We use an agent-based modeling approach to represent the actors who make resource-use and consumption choices as virtual agents. These choices are based on different individual preferences and the information individuals derive from (a) rules enforced by a formal
organization to limit firewood extraction and (b) norms of resource use that are based on observations of other households’ extraction behavior. Household extraction behavior is
determined by rules and social interactions among networks of neighbors. We used the model to explore the relationships between organizations and social networks in a series of resource use
and management computational experiments to observe how agent choices shape resource-use behavior and contribute to improvements or degradations in collectively owned common-pool resources. (Agrawal et al. 2012).
Our model has three components: two types of agents that represent the key actors (households and formal organizations) and the resource being utilized (the forest). We model
agent behaviors and resource changes over time using discrete monthly time steps. Our focus is on the decisions households make: in particular, at each step, households must decide how
much resource to extract. The resource being extracted is firewood, which is obtained from local forests and constitutes the primary energy used for cooking in India (ABE, 1985; Bhatt,
Q8 2004). agents in the context of forest use behavior in rural areas because such situations are well-known important examples
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.comses.net/codebases/3352/releases/1.0.0/