Resource-Use Simulations Using Agents with Psychology-Relevant Internal Models

Abstract. In this paper, we present an approach to modeling the internal psychological processes of resource-using individuals. From results of relevant resource-use literature, we identified nine essential influence factors and their interactions: communication, feedback about other’s harvest, trust, social value orientations, group identity, resource feedback, resource uncertainty, payoff, and perceived cause of resource abundance or scarcity. Based on these findings, we built the Social-Ecological Relevance Model of resource use. Comparison of simulation results with data of real experiments shows that the developed model is an appropriate internal model for agents in resource-use simulations. We ran simulations targeting to trace individual dynamics in a group of five agents that used from the same resource. It could be show that although some agents under low uncertainty overuse the resource the majority of the group is using it in a sustainable way and thus stabilizing the resource on a higher level. Finally, we discuss the implications for future research