A Collective Action Simulation Platform

Stephen Cranefield, Hannah Clark-Younger, Geoff Hay

Abstract: In this paper, we discuss some types of expectation that contribute to the behaviour of social agents, and investigate the role that these social expectations can play in the resolution of collective action problems. We describe our Collective Action Simulation Platform (CASP), a framework that allows us to integrate the Java-based Repast Simphony platform with a Prolog-based event calculus interpreter. This allows us to run simulations of agents who make reference to social expectations when reasoning about which actions to perform. We demonstrate the use of CASP in modelling a simple scenario involving agents in a collective action problem, showing that agents who are informed by social expectations can be led to cooperative behaviour that would otherwise be considered “non-rational”.