The overall objective of this work is to improve the holistic value of energy development strategies by integrating management criteria for water availability, water quality, and ecosystem health into the energy system planning process. The Snake River Basin (SRB) in southern Idaho is used as a case study to show options for improving full economic utilization of aquatic resources given multiple scenarios such as changing climate, additional regulations, and increasing population. Through the incorporation of multiple management criteria, potential crosscutting solutions to energy and water issues in the SRB can be developed. The final result of this work will be a multi-criteria decision support tool usable by policy makers and researchers alike that will give insight into the behavior of the management criteria over time and will allow the user to experiment with a range of potential solutions. Because several basins in the arid west are dealing with similar water, energy, and ecosystem issues, the tool and conclusions will be transferrable to a wide range of locations and applications. This is a very large project to be completed in phases. This paper deals with interactions between the hydrologic system and water use at a basin level. Future work will include the interdependency between energy use and water use in these systems.
In this paper we demonstrate how the Major League Baseball (MLB) free agent compensation system (FA-CS), intended to achieve parity across MLB teams, has the unintended and adverse consequence of increasing inequality. The FA-CS compensates teams that release a Type A Free Agent by giving them a compensation pick the highest draft pick from the team that signs the free agent. The cost of each lost pick decreases as teams sign multiple Free Agents. This characteristic lowers the cost per Free Agents, when multiple Free Agents are signed. However, such benefits are solely accessible to teams that are relatively resource unconstrained, giving rise to an inequality-increasing positive feedback. To explore the importance of the FA-CS positive feedback, we develop a dynamic model of the flow of Type A Free Agents through their MLB career, including their maturation from draft picks, to minor league, to major league, to free agency, and finally to retirement. Additionally, we model teams free agent hiring process to understand free agent dispersion within the league. Isolating the FA-CS feedback from other scale effects and calibrating the model to MLB data we estimate the strength of this adverse inequality-increasing effect.
Throughout history some societies, including the Maya, Anazi and Easter Island, have collapsed, while others facing similar challenges, such as New Guinea and Japan, have succeeded. The Maya and New Guinea cases were taken from Jared Diamond's study, "Collapse," to create a system dynamics model capable of producing both the collapse and success behavior. The endogenous pressures described by Diamond were used to develop the feedback story. Policy interventions undertaken in by the society in the model were controlling family size, increasing farming intensity, reducing resource usage and composting. In the initial attempt the society enacted these interventions in response the cues of food shortages, perceived environmental degradation and falling crop yields (an indicator of soil quality). However, this version of the model was incapable of creating the success behavior mode, ruling out these cues as ones successful societies could have used. In version two, the society used a target land fraction occupied as its main cue and the gap between needed food production per acre and actual food production per acre as the drive to increase composting. This version was able to produce success behavior, which establishes these cues as possible cues a successful society could have used.
Global climate change is affecting the rain-runoff process around the world since pre-climate change normal rain patterns are giving way to short periods of strong precipitation, followed by long periods without rain. In addition, temperature and evaporation are expected to increase about 20% over the next 20 years. The State of Guanajuato in Central Mexico utilizes 87% of all available water for agricultural production and is extremely concerned about the impacts of climate change on water supply and demand for its various uses in the short and medium term. To explore the future impacts of climate change in Guanajuato a two-component approach was developed: (1) an atmospheric interface that generates synthetic precipitation, temperature and evaporation time series; and simulates the characteristics of these three meteorological variables and (2) a system dynamics model that beginning with the rain-runoff process generates time related behavior for natural and man-made process for each of 13 watershed that make up the States geography. Base Line and Climate Change scenarios have been generated from the present through 2030 to examine the impacts that this phenomenon is having on each watershed; recommendations have been drawn to assist these areas in adapting to new climate conditions.
In this paper we present our concept and prototype of a web platform which supports participatory modelling. This platform facilitates web-based collaborative and cumulative modelling when face-to-face participatory modelling sessions cannot be organized as often as desired. Successive iteration steps of the model development can thus be displayed interactively in a standard web browser together with comments and explanations made by the modeller. The platform strengthens the support of formal model construction and documentation on the one hand and reduces the effort of model re-publishing on the other hand. This platform shall be used to support participatory modelling and decision-making processes in the field of sustainable development and in many other fields.
Shared capitalism is a set of compensation practices (e.g., employee ownership, stock options, and profit sharing) through which worker pay, or wealth, depends on the performance of the firm or work group. Empirical studies on whether employee ownership improves firm performance, while predominately positive, offer mixed results. This paper addresses the question: under what conditions do shared capitalism policies improve firm performance? A system dynamics model of high performance work systems estimated using the NBER Shared Capitalism dataset and calibrated to a clean technology startup company is presented. The model posits explicit causal mechanisms to explain how various shared capitalism policies and human resource practices influence employee behaviors that drive business processes, and how those business processes interact with market conditions to generate firm performance. Simulation analyses demonstrate that employee ownership and profit sharing create and mediate the strength of multiple reinforcing feedbacks linking firm performance and employee behavior. The more wealth is shared through broad-based employee ownership, the more wealth is created, given the appropriate conditions. Policy analysis suggests how mutual gains for owners and employees can be attained through a balance of salary, stock grants and other shared capitalism policies.
This poster summarizes a project designed to explore the complex social system that influences households decision to use banks and other financial institutions. The dynamic hypothesis was that the number of unbanked and under banked African-Americans in the region was due to a complex interaction of individual behaviors, banking policies and practices, and those of the payday lending industry. The project was designed to develop a grounded theory describing households experiences related to financial institutions and how financial decisions based on previous experiences impacted their household economic security. Group model building methods were used to gather insights from banks, alternative financial institutions, and community residents.