NetLogo User Community Models

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## WHAT IS IT?

The model stimulates people’s economic variability based on education, economic status, and job-seeking ability, and to evaluate scenarios on how the economic status of people changes in a city with differing levels of education and job/people availability.

The purpose of the study is to determine the relationship between education, the degree of economic status, the level of income, and the feeling of happiness. The environment in which the model runs is an urban area that is assumed to have job availabilities like a traditional urban city center, where people with mixed educational and economic statuses encounter job centers to take up open ones.

## HOW IT WORKS

The model starts with assigning education level and percent job-seeking number which becomes the basis for the rest of the simulation. Job centers are nothing but places of work availability where agents traverse to and increase their wealth and in turn happiness.

User determined percent of agents will be educated and will be given range of values from 1 to 10, where 1 will be least education level and 10 being the highest education level. Similarly a persent of agents as determined by the user will be seeking for job and their seeking state variable will be '1'.

To gain wealth, job seeking agents will wander and when they come across a job patch (green in color), they take up the job and increase wealth and happiness by 5 and 1 points respectively. If they come across patch with no jobs (black in color), they reduce their wealth and happiness by 1.

As simulation progresses, the agents become wealthy (when wealth>15), they create four types of jobs that is wage based depending on the patch variable 'newvalue' (new-value > .76,>.51 & <0.75, >.25 and <.50 and <.25).

If no one comes in contact with a job for a period of time (set by the slider non-usage limit), the job disappears.

## HOW TO USE IT

Press SETUP and then GO.

The PEOPLE slider determines how many people "agents" are randomly distributed in the initial setup phase of the model

The JOBS slider determines how many initioal jobs availability and are randomly distributed in the initial setup of the model.

The NON-USAGE-LIMIT determines how many ticks a job can go unused before being disappeared.

Two monitors that display the information about the current state of the urban environment with breakdown of wealth distribution among agents via the WEALTHY, UPPER-MIDDLE, LOWER-MIDDLE, and POOR.

The JOBS monitor tells how many jobs are currently present.

The AVG NON-USAGE, AVG WEALTH, AVG HAPPYNESS monitors tells the average number of ticks it has been since each of the jobs has been utilized, average wealth and happiness of the agents respectively.

The LEVEL OF WEALTH plot shows the history of how many agents were at each levels of wealth at each tick of the model.

## THINGS TO NOTICE

How the new jobs are created by the wealthy agents?

## THINGS TO TRY

Run simulations with different levels of %EDUCATED and %JOBSEEKING to understand how different levels of initial conditions results in different outcomes.

## EXTENDING THE MODEL

The model can be improvised by incorporating cultural features of the agents in which
agents sharing similar cultures would tend to create/provide jobs to the agents of similar
cultures.

Competition for jobs can be included to make the job search scenario as real as possible.

## RELATED MODELS

This model was an adaptation and extension of the Netlogo "Urban Suite" Model found in the Netlogo library.

## CREDITS AND REFERENCES

This model was an adaptation and extension of the Netlogo Urban Suite Model.

* Felsen, M. and Wilensky, U. (2007). NetLogo Urban Suite - Awareness model. http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/UrbanSuite-Awareness. Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.

* Wilensky, U. (1999). NetLogo. http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/. Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.

Please see the project web site ( http://ccl.northwestern.edu/cities/ ) for more information.

## HOW TO CITE

This model was created by the team of students at George Mason University for satisfying the final project requirements of the course CSS 610 Agent Based Modeling and Simulation.

If you mention this model or the NetLogo software in a publication, we ask that you include the citations below.

For the model itself:

* Pavithra Sripathanallur Murali, Jada Williams, Mansoor Bari (2022). Wealth-Happiness-Education: Interrelation model. George Mason University, Fairfax, VA.

Please cite the NetLogo software as:

* Wilensky, U. (1999). NetLogo. http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/. Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.

## COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2022 Pavithra Sripathanallur Murali, Jada Williams, Mansoor Bari.