This paper will explore the effects of errors in floating point arithmetic in two published agent-based models: the first a model of land use change (Polhill et al. 2001; Gotts et al. 2003), the second a model of the stock market (LeBaron et al. 1999). The first example demonstrates how branching...

In this paper social dilemmas are modelled as n-player games. Orthodox game theorists have been able to provide several concepts that narrow the set of expected outcomes in these models. However, in their search for a reduced set of solutions, they had to pay a very high price: they had to make...

We report on replications of early experiments with FEARLUS, using larger numbers of agents, larger numbers of land parcels, and greater network connectivity than in the original work. We find that results from the larger-scale experiments differ from the smaller environments used previously....

This study analyses the impact of a priori identified determinants of adoption of innovative animal health and welfare technologies by Scottish livestock farmers. The analysis uses a dataset of 1,764 observations for livestock farmers collected through a large scale survey of Scottish...

This paper addresses the question of farmer objectives associated with private farming in Eastern Europe. Drawing on qualitative interviews with private farmers in Bulgaria and southern Russia, the instrumental objectives of business development and job-replacement consistent with recent...

Recent decades have seen a rapid increase in the rate of conversion from conventional to organic farming, as organic farming shifted from an alternative production approach practiced by a small number of idealists, to the de facto alternative to mainstream conventional production. Although there...

A series of studies have explored the future intentions of farm households to reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). This paper explores the intentions of Scottish livestock farmers under proposed reforms and, using the path dependency model, estimates the effect of past decisions on...

In this paper we compare models of two different kinds of processes in multi-agent-based social simulations (MABSS): military conflict within a states-system (GeoSim), and land use and ownership change (FEARLUS). This is a kind of model-to-model comparison which is novel within Multi-Agent Based...

The paper analyses the land use behaviour of Scottish land managers and the factors influencing it in the current context of the EU rural land use policies. The analysis employs a frequently used behavioural economics method, namely structural equation modelling (SEM). Central to the empirical...