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This paper presents an agent-based model explaining voter knowledge in the context of electoral competition. It shows that a set of simple behavioral rules implemented by voters, parties and media outlets generates novel (and testable) predictions regarding the mass-mediated underpinnings of aggregated voter knowledge and party representativeness. More specifically, it finds that increasing competition among media outlets has a positive effect on the political knowledge of the electorate at large. It also finds that increasing media competition leads to parties that are more accountable to the median voter, but only when voters care about the quality of the news alone.

Abstract:Public reason liberalism includes an ideal of political stability where justified institutions reach a kind of self-enforcing equilibrium. Such an order must be stable for the right reasons — where persons comply with the rules of the order for moral reasons, rather than out of fear or self-interest. John Rawls called a society stable in this way well-ordered.In this essay, I contend that a more sophisticated model of a well-ordered society, specifically an agent-based model, yields a richer and more attractive understanding of political stability. An agent-based model helps us to distinguish between three concepts of political stability — durability, balance, and immunity. A well-ordered society is one that possesses a high degree of social trust and cooperative behavior among its citizens (durability) with low short-run variability (balance). A well-ordered society also resists destabilization caused by noncompliant agents in or entering the system (immunity).Distinguishing between these three concepts complicates the necessary reformulation of the idea of a well-ordered society. Going forward, public reason theorists must now distinguish between types of assurance, specify heretofore unknown aspects of reasonable behavior, and reconceive of the nonideal preconditions for forming a stable, ideal social order.

This paper proposes and tests an agent-based model of worker and job matching. The model takes residential locations of workers and the locations of employers as exogenous and deals specifically with the interactions between firms and workers in creating a job-worker match and the commute outcomes. It is meant to illustrate that by explicitly modeling the search and hiring process, origins and destinations (ODs) can be linked at a disaggregate level. The model is tested on a toy-city as well as using data from the Twin Cities area. The toy-city model illustrates that the model predicts reasonable commute outcomes, with agents selecting the closest work place when wage and skill differentiation is absent in the labor market. The introduction of wage dispersion and skill differentiation in the model increases the the average home to work distances considerably. Using data from Twin Cities area of Minneapolis-St. Paul, aggregate commute and wage outcomes from the model are shown to capture the trends in the observed data. Overall, the results suggest that the behavior rules as implemented lead to reasonable patterns. Future directions are also discussed.

This paper investigates how the inclusion of political lifecycles and unrestricted housing development by private developers will impact the spatial arrangement and density of slums in a virtual urban environment. To do this, I build on the agent based model (ABM) entitled "Slumulation" developed by Crooks, Koizumi and Patel (2012). The intention of this is to generate conversation around the ways individual action impact the urban en- vironment, and also how other stakeholders in the city create conditions that motivate the emergence of certain spatial arrangements over time. Through the addition of code into the original model, I am able to augment the actions of two actors in particular: politicians and developers. Borrowing from literature, I include local political cycles that minimize the interaction between urban dwellers and politicians throughout most of the simulation, except for in the case of election times where special consideration is made that allows for lower rents and lax rule enforcement in exchange for political support. In the center of this city, housing developers are programmed to build housing for high- and middle-income households because the real estate sector and government policies are encouraging the construction of a new and modern urban image that slowly prices out lower-income residents of the inner city. These additions show that local politics and de- velopment without efforts to mitigate the impact on individual households may contribute to slums, high density urban neighborhoods, and the peripheralization of the city's most vulnerable.

AbstractIn recent times, organizations have increasingly adopted structures in which decision making is distributed rather than centralized. This approach often leads to task allocation emerging from the bottom up, moving away from strict top-down control. This shift raises a key question: How can we guide this emergent task allocation to form an effective organizational structure? To address this question, this paper introduces a model of an organization where task assignment is influenced by agents acting based on either long-term or short-term motivations, facilitating a bottom-up approach. The model incorporates an incentive mechanism designed to steer the emergent task allocation process, offering rewards that range from group-based to individual-focused. The analysis reveals that when task allocation is driven by short-term objectives and aligned with specific incentive systems, it leads to improved organizational performance compared to traditional, top-down organizational designs. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the presence of group-based rewards reduces the necessity of mirroring, i.e., for a precise matching of the organizational structure to task characteristics.

The paper discusses development of the investments block in an agent-based interregional multisector model of the Russian economy. The ability of the model to reproduce stationary states of the economy and economic growth under various regimes of intra-company fixed capital investment is considered. A given steady state can be achieved by choosing the shares of profits assigned to investment. Output growth was insured by reducing labor intensity by 2 % per year in the Leontief-type production functions of firms with a fixed level of labor resources. When investments are financed from the profits of firms under fixed share regime, the model economy demonstrate a balanced growth.