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...

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...

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...

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...

The Final Volume of the Groundbreaking Trilogy on Agent-Based Modeling. In this pioneering synthesis, Joshua Epstein introduces a new theoretical entity: Agent Zero. This software individual, or "agent," is endowed with distinct emotional/affective, cognitive/deliberative, and social modules....

Prelude to chapter 1 : the generativist manifesto --Ch. 1.Agent-based computational models and generative social science /Joshua M. Epstein --Prelude to chapter 2 : confession of a wandering bark --Ch. 2.Remarks on the foundations of agent-based generative social science /Joshua M. Epstein...