Corinna Elsenbroich - Böcker

Becoming an Agent-based Modeller takes you on a journey, from curiosity about social phenomena to generating them with a computer simulation. The book introduces agent-based modelling as a method to understand societies as complex systems, systems of interconnected, interdependent, and interacting agents.The book is structured like a course rather than a textbook or reference book. The core of the book is an extended tutorial introducing the NetLogo programming language. Using the example of an epidemic, it explores how an agent-based model of social influence, situational awareness, and contextual decisions by individual agents about protective behaviour can help us understand plausible epidemic trajectories. The tutorial demonstrates how to build an agent-based model from scratch and use it in research, including the conceptualisation stage, the operationalisation and implementation, experimentation, and interpretation. This practical part of the book is embedded in chapters on theory, epistemology, and ethics of agent-based modelling.With pedagogical tools including key discussion points, illustrations, and highlighted concepts, this is an ideal resource for courses on ABM, and for postgraduate students and researchers in the social sciences and beyond, who wish to develop their understanding of agent-based modelling.

Becoming an Agent-based Modeller takes you on a journey, from curiosity about social phenomena to generating them with a computer simulation. The book introduces agent-based modelling as a method to understand societies as complex systems, systems of interconnected, interdependent, and interacting agents.The book is structured like a course rather than a textbook or reference book. The core of the book is an extended tutorial introducing the NetLogo programming language. Using the example of an epidemic, it explores how an agent-based model of social influence, situational awareness, and contextual decisions by individual agents about protective behaviour can help us understand plausible epidemic trajectories. The tutorial demonstrates how to build an agent-based model from scratch and use it in research, including the conceptualisation stage, the operationalisation and implementation, experimentation, and interpretation. This practical part of the book is embedded in chapters on theory, epistemology, and ethics of agent-based modelling.With pedagogical tools including key discussion points, illustrations, and highlighted concepts, this is an ideal resource for courses on ABM, and for postgraduate students and researchers in the social sciences and beyond, who wish to develop their understanding of agent-based modelling.

This book contains the proceedings of the 18th Social Simulation Conference (SSC) and covers the state of the art of social simulation modeling.

This book contains the proceedings of the 18th Social Simulation Conference (SSC) and covers the state of the art of social simulation modeling. The SSC is the annual conference of the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA) and the major global conference devoted to this topic. It is aimed at promoting social simulation and computational social science. The book is the biggest collection of agent-based modeling research. It covers all aspects of modeling, from theory and philosophy of modeling to question of model design, purpose, and structure, using data, visualization, model interrelation, and open modeling.This book is targeted at researchers in social simulation regardless of disciplinary backgrounds, across career stages and different sectors, such as academia, industry, and policy

This book presents a multi-disciplinary investigation into extortion rackets with a particular focus on the structures of criminal organisations and their collapse, societal processes in which extortion rackets strive and fail and the impacts of bottom-up and top-down ways of fighting extortion racketeering. Through integrating a range of disciplines and methods the book provides an extensive case study of empirically based computational social science. It is based on a wealth of qualitative data regarding multiple extortion rackets, such as the Sicilian Mafia, an international money laundering organisation and a predatory extortion case in Germany. Computational methods are used for data analysis, to help in operationalising data for use in agent-based models and to explore structures and dynamics of extortion racketeering through simulations. In addition to textual data sources, stakeholders and experts are extensively involved, providing narratives for analysis and qualitative validation of models. The book presents a systematic application of computational social science methods to the substantive area of extortion racketeering. The reader will gain a deep understanding of extortion rackets, in particular their entrenchment in society and processes supporting and undermining extortion rackets. Also covered are computational social science methods, in particular computationally assisted text analysis and agent-based modelling, and the integration of empirical, theoretical and computational social science.

This book presents a multi-disciplinary investigation into extortion rackets with a particular focus on the structures of criminal organisations and their collapse, societal processes in which extortion rackets strive and fail and the impacts of bottom-up and top-down ways of fighting extortion racketeering.

The book focusses on questions of individual and collective action, the emergence and dynamics of social norms and the feedback between individual behaviour and social phenomena. It discusses traditional modelling approaches to social norms and shows the usefulness of agent-based modelling for the study of these micro-macro interactions. Existing agent-based models of social norms are discussed and it is shown that so far too much priority has been given to parsimonious models and questions of the emergence of norms, with many aspects of social norms, such as norm-change, not being modelled.  Juvenile delinquency, group radicalisation and moral decision making are used as case studies for agent-based models of collective action extending existing models by providing an embedding into social networks, social influence via argumentation and a causal action theory of moral decision making. The major contribution of the book is to highlight the multifaceted nature of the dynamics of social norms, consisting not only of emergence, and the importance of embedding of agent-based models into existing theory.