In areas prone to natural hazards, a key goal of risk management is mitigating risk by encouraging people to adopt protective measures. Despite the efforts of civic emergency management agencies, the goal of ensuring the sustained adoption of these measures has proved elusive. This paper argues...

A description of the area of Agent Based Social Simulation (ABSS) from a computer scientist’s perspective is presented. We begin by defining ABSS by positioning it with respect to the three research areas that it is related to, i.e., agent-based computing, the social sciences, and...

Residential water use constitutes a major part of urban water demand, and has be gaining importance in the urban water supply. Considering the complexity of residential water use system, an agent-based social simulation, i.e. the Residential Water Use Model (RWUM), is developed in this paper to...

Role playing games (RPGs) can be used as participatory simulation methods for environmental management. However, researchers in the field need to be aware of the influence of the game settings on participants' behavioural patterns and attitudes, before fine tuning the design and use of their...

This paper presents a case of parsimony and generalization in model comparisons. We submitted two versions of the same cognitive model to the Market Entry Competition (MEC), which involved four-person and two-alternative (enter or stay out) games. Our model was designed according to the...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the state of macroeconomic modeling and the use of macroeconomic models in policy analysis has come under heavy criticism. Macroeconomists in academia and policy institutions have been blamed for relying too much on a particular class of...

In this paper, two modelling systems used for the simulation of water resources management are compared. These modelling systems can be used in the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive or to perform any other kind of integrated assessment with regard to water resources...