We model two interacting contagion processes: one of disease and one of fear of the disease. Individuals can contract fear through contact with individuals who are infected with the disease (the sick), infected with fear only (the scared), and infected with both fear and disease (the sick and...

Obesity is a rapidly growing epidemic in the United States and a major public health challenge worldwide. To counteract this epidemic effectively, better understanding of its mechanisms are needed - we must understand not just what factors play a role, but how and why they matter. Most studies...

This paper develops the concepts and methods of a process we will call "alignment of computational models" of "docking" for short. Alignment is needed to determine whether two models can produce the same results, which in turn is the basis for critical experiments and for tests of whether one...

This paper extends the literature on the evolution of norms with an agent-based model capturing a phenomenon that has been essentially ignored, namely that individual thought--or computing--is often inversely related to the strength of a social norm. Once a norm is entrenched, we confirm...

The emergence of cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) games is generally assumed to require repeated play (and strategies such as Tit-For-Tat, involving memory of previous interactions) or features ("tags") permitting cooperators and defectors to distinguish one another. In the Demographic...

The emergence of cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) games is generally assumed to require repeated play (and strategies such as Tit-For-Tat, involving memory of previous interactions) or features ("tags") permitting cooperators and defectors to distinguish one another. In the Demographic...

An agent-based computational model of Long House Valley, in northern Arizona near Monument Valley, is described and demontrated. The model, that runs from about AD 400 to 1400, consists of artificial adaptive agents (households) who inhabit a digitized version of the Long House Valley landscape....

This paper provides an independent review and evaluation of the PBGC's Pension Insurance Modeling System (PIMS). Our analysis suggests that the PIMS model was, in many ways, “state-of-the-art” when it was created approximately two decades ago. However, several key components of the model...

Canonical models of rational choice fail to account for many forms of motivated adaptive behaviors, specifically in domains such as food selections. To describe behavior in such emotion- and reward-laden scenarios, researchers have proposed dual-process models that posit competition between a...

Ethnocentrism is a nearly universal syndrome of attitudes and behaviors, typically including in-group favoritism. Empirical evidence suggests that a predisposition to favor in-groups can be easily triggered by even arbitrary group distinctions and that preferential cooperation within groups...