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Society & Economics

This category gathers agent-based models that reveal how local interactions between individuals produce large-scale global patterns — from phantom traffic jams and stock-market crashes to epidemic waves, residential segregation, opinion polarisation and growing wealth inequality. By adjusting parameters such as transmission rates, tolerance thresholds, driver density or trading strategies in real time, you can watch emergent collective behaviour appear before your eyes. Each interactive simulation runs directly in your browser, with no installation required, making them ideal for students, teachers, economists, urban planners and anyone curious about complex systems. Exploring these models builds genuine intuition for why societies, markets and cities behave the way they do, and shows how the same mathematical frameworks used in academic research can illuminate everyday social and economic phenomena.

16 simulations ABM · Canvas 2D SIR · Schelling · Game Theory

Category Simulations

Each simulation runs fully in the browser — no server, no installation

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★★★ Advanced New
Queueing Theory
An M/M/c queue with Poisson arrivals and exponential service. Compare live metrics (ρ, Lq, Wq) against Erlang-C theory — see the queue explode as ρ→1.
Queueing TheoryM/M/cErlang-CCanvas 2D
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★★★ Advanced New
Population Pyramid
An age-sex pyramid projected forward with a cohort-component model — births, age-specific deaths and ageing — morphing between expansive, stationary and constrictive shapes.
DemographyFertility RateCohort ModelCanvas 2D
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★★★ Advanced
Axelrod's Tournament — Iterated PD
Robert Axelrod's 1980 round-robin: 10 IPD strategies — All-D, All-C, TFT, TF2T, Generous TFT, Grim, Pavlov, Random, Joss, Friedman — play hundreds of rounds. Tit-for-Tat famously wins.
Canvas 2D IPD Tit-for-Tat Tournament
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★★★ Advanced
Pedestrian Crowds — Social Force Model
Helbing's social-force model: desired velocity, exponential repulsion and walls reproduce lane formation, doorway arch jams and the counter-intuitive faster-is-slower effect.
Canvas 2D Social Force Crowd Dynamics Helbing
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★★★ Advanced
Traffic Jams — Nagel–Schreckenberg
The NaSch cellular automaton on a ring: accelerate, brake to gap, randomize, move. Phantom jams emerge from noise; the space-time diagram reveals backward-propagating jam waves.
Canvas 2D Cellular Automaton Traffic Phantom Jam
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★★☆ Moderate Popular
Epidemic Spread (SIR)
The classic SIR/SEIR compartmental model visualised on a network graph. Adjust transmission rate, recovery period and vaccination coverage to see how herd immunity emerges — or fails.
SIR Model Canvas 2D Agent-Based
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★★☆ Moderate
Predator–Prey Dynamics
Lotka–Volterra population oscillations on a grid: rabbits graze, foxes hunt, both populations cycle in and out of boom and bust. Live population graph reveals the phase relationship.
Lotka-Volterra ABM Grid
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★★★ Advanced New
Population Dynamics
Continuous differential-equation model of multiple species competing for shared resources. Overlay the phase portrait to see stable equilibria, limit cycles and chaotic regimes.
ODE Solver Phase Portrait Chaos
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★★☆ Moderate New
Crowd & Evacuation
Dozens of pedestrian agents navigate a floor plan using the Social Force Model. Place walls and exits to test bottleneck effects, counter-flow and the "faster is slower" paradox in evacuation scenarios.
Social Force Pathfinding ABM
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★★★ Advanced
Evolutionary Game Theory
Agents play iterated Prisoner's Dilemma on a spatial grid. Watch cooperation emerge or collapse as you vary the temptation-to-defect and memory length. Compare Tit-for-Tat vs Always-Defect strategies.
Prisoner's Dilemma Evolutionary Grid
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★★☆ Moderate New
Disease Spread (SEIR)
Spatial SEIR model: Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, Recovered. Click to seed infection or vaccinate cells. Live R₀ and epidemic curve update in real time.
SEIR Epidemiology ABM
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★★☆ Moderate New
Traffic Flow (Nagel–Schreckenberg)
Cellular automaton traffic model on a circular road. Increase density to watch phantom jams appear spontaneously — no accident needed. Adjust driver aggressiveness and slowdown probability.
CA Model Traffic Emergence
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New ★☆☆ Easy
Schelling Segregation
Agent-based model showing how mild individual preferences create large-scale social segregation. Adjust grid size and tolerance threshold — watch ordered neighbourhoods emerge.
Agent-Based Emergence Canvas 2D
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★★☆ Moderate
Epidemic Dynamics
Particle-based SEIR epidemic model. Adjust transmission rate β, recovery rate γ, and vaccination level. Watch R₀ drive waves of infection and herd immunity emerge.
SEIR R₀ Canvas 2D
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New ★★☆ Moderate
Pedestrian Flow
Social force model for crowd dynamics. Agents navigate corridors and bottlenecks — watch lane formation, counter-flow and evacuation patterns emerge.
Social Force Agent-Based Canvas 2D
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New ★★☆ Moderate
NaSch Traffic Model
Nagel-Schreckenberg cellular automaton for traffic flow. Phantom jams emerge spontaneously — adjust car density and dawdling probability.
Cellular Automaton Traffic Canvas 2D
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New ★★☆ Moderate
City Growth
DLA-based urban sprawl simulation. Watch a city grow organically from a seed — rivers, roads and density gradients shape the fractal boundary.
DLA Urban Growth Canvas 2D
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New ★☆☆ Easy
Bus Bunching
Why do buses always arrive in pairs? Simulate headway instability, then enable holding strategies and watch spacing become stable again.
Transit Self-Organisation Canvas 2D
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New ★★☆ Medium
Opinion Dynamics
Deffuant bounded-confidence model: agents influence each other only when their opinions are close enough. Watch echo chambers and polarisation emerge.
Agent-Based Echo Chambers Canvas 2D
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New ★★☆ Medium
Income Inequality
Boltzmann-Pareto exchange model: random wealth transfers spontaneously produce extreme inequality. Measure Gini coefficient and explore tax redistribution effects.
Gini Pareto Canvas 2D
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New ★★☆ Medium
Voter Model & Schelling Segregation
Classic voter model on a 2D grid: agents copy a neighbour's opinion. Three modes — Voter, Noisy Voter and Schelling Segregation. Watch consensus or segregation emerge from purely local copying rules.
Canvas 2D Voter Model Schelling
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New ★★☆ Moderate
Financial Market
200 heterogeneous agents — fundamentalists, trend followers and noise traders — compete in a live order book. Watch bubbles and crashes emerge from simple trading rules.
Canvas 2D Agent-Based Order Book Volatility
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★★☆ Moderate New
Labor Market Dynamics
Simulate unemployment and vacancy co-evolution using the Beveridge curve and Cobb-Douglas matching function. Add demand shocks and adjust separation and matching efficiency.
Beveridge Curve Matching Function Canvas 2D
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★★☆ Moderate New
Social Influence Cascade
Linear Threshold Model (Granovetter): each node adopts a behavior when fraction of neighbors exceedi...
Linear Threshold Granovetter Agent-Based Canvas 2D
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★★☆ Moderate New
Innovation Diffusion — Bass Model
Bass diffusion model: dN/dt = (p + q·N/M)·(M−N). Innovators (p) and imitators (q) drive S-curve adop...
Bass Model S-Curve Diffusion Canvas 2D

Related Articles

The mathematics and theory behind these simulations

Epidemiology
SIR & SEIR Epidemic Models
Compartmental ODEs, R₀, herd immunity threshold and network-based spreading.
Population Dynamics
Lotka–Volterra Equations
Predator–prey cycles, equilibria, phase portraits and real-world examples.
Agent-Based Models
Flocking & Emergent Behaviour
How individual rules produce collective intelligence — from Boids to social systems.

About Society & Social Systems Simulations

Segregation, traffic, game theory, and social dynamics — modelled

Society and social systems simulations apply mathematical modelling to human behaviour. Schelling's segregation model shows how mild individual preferences can produce stark neighbourhood segregation with no central planning. Traffic flow simulations use the Nagel-Schreckenberg cellular automaton and IDM car-following model to reproduce phantom jams and the stop-and-go waves visible on real motorways.

Game theory simulations pit strategies against each other in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments, demonstrating why cooperation emerges in repeated interactions. These agent-based models are used by economists, urban planners, and sociologists to study systemic effects that arise from individual decisions. Adjusting tolerance thresholds, car density, or strategy payoffs reveals the fragility and robustness of social equilibria.

Each simulation in this category is built with accuracy and interactivity in mind. The underlying mathematical models are the same ones used in academic research and professional engineering — just made accessible through a web browser. Changing parameters in real time and observing the results is one of the most effective ways to build intuition for complex scientific and engineering concepts.

All Categories

Key Concepts

Topics and algorithms you'll explore in this category

Agent-Based ModellingEmergent social dynamics from individual rules
Schelling SegregationLocal preference drives global residential patterns
Crowd BehaviourSocial force model and pedestrian flow
Opinion DynamicsDeffuant-Hegselmann bounded confidence models
Epidemics on NetworksSIR/SEIR spreading on small-world graphs
Traffic FlowNagel-Schreckenberg cellular automaton model

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about this simulation category

What social simulation topics are covered?
Schelling residential segregation, social force crowd evacuation, opinion dynamics (bounded confidence), SIR epidemic spreading on networks, Nagel-Schreckenberg traffic CA, and financial market microstructure.
What is the Schelling segregation model?
Agents on a grid move to a randomly chosen empty cell if fewer than T% of their neighbours share their type. Even a mild preference for similar neighbours (T ≈ 30%) produces strongly segregated spatial patterns — a striking illustration of emergent segregation without individual racism.
How is crowd behaviour simulated?
The social force model treats pedestrians as particles attracted to their destination (goal force) and repelled from walls and other pedestrians (social-distance force). This produces realistic lane formation, arch-shaped congestion at exits, and oscillating flows at bottlenecks.
What is an agent-based model and how is it used in society simulations?
An agent-based model (ABM) simulates a system by defining individual agents with local rules, then running many agents simultaneously and observing emergent collective behaviour. Society simulations use ABMs to model pedestrian evacuation, opinion dynamics (bounded confidence), epidemic spreading on contact networks, and market microstructure — phenomena that cannot easily be captured by aggregate equations alone.

Every Society & Economics simulation on this page is free, browser-based and built to make abstract theory tangible. Whether you want to learn Society & Economics online or run an interactive Society & Economics model for a class, these tools let you experiment hands-on with epidemics, traffic, segregation, game theory and markets. Real-world applications range from planning safe building evacuations and public-transport schedules to forecasting epidemic spread and stress-testing economic policy — the same agent-based methods researchers and city planners rely on, now open to everyone.