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The hospital system is a complex service system in which patients and hospitals interact and make their decisions based on bounded rationality and information. In this paper, we develop a generative agent-based model to simulate the behavior of a hospital service system. Our model combines agent-based simulation and queueing models to mimic the hospital service processes. Our goal is to simulate and understand the growth and size distribution of hospitals. This simulation model includes agents for supply elements (i.e., hospitals with different resources and expansion strategies) and demand elements (i.e., patients with different preferences for their hospital selections) in a hospital service system. Three important questions are investigated: 1) what is the emergent size distribution of hospitals? 2) what key factors influence the size distribution? and 3) how sensitive is the size distribution to these key factors? Simulation results show that the size distribution is neither power law nor lognormal. Rather, the distribution is leptokurtic, and more skewed than normal but less skewed than lognormal. This result contradicts those in extant literature on the size distributions of human and natural systems, including cities, firms, power-grids, and citation network. We conduct a set of experiments to identify the generative mechanisms for the hospital size distribution and to test the robustness of the results. The model was validated empirically by using a U.S. hospital size dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel agent-based framework for modeling and simulating competitive and cooperative behavior under conflict is proposed. Formal definitions of Nash, general metarational, symmetric metarational, and sequential stability decision rules reflecting human behavior under conflict are presented in this paper. The definitions are inspired by the solution concepts of the graph model for conflict resolution and are conceived for implantation in the proposed agent-based modeling and simulation framework. With these decision rules, competitive and cooperative conflict dynamics are simulated for a theoretical common-pool resources dilemma. Moreover, policies can be tested for their effectiveness in avoiding or recouping from a tragedy of the commons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facing horizontal channel competition in a hierarchical distribution system, independent intermediaries such as wholesalers and retailers are keen to find the optimal location and pricing strategies that enable them to adapt to the increasingly competitive business environment. To help market intermediaries to address their challenges, we propose in this paper a spatial agent-based model (SAM), grounded in complex adaptive systems, which comprises four types of agents, namely the world, the manufacturer, firms, and consumers. We derive the firms' optimal behaviors in response to competition by evaluating the evolutionary location and pricing strategies using a genetic algorithm. We observe that a pyramid structure and the bullwhip effect in demand emerge from the evolutionary behavior of the SAM. We also find that buyers' searching ability enhanced by information technology has a significant effect on the degree of competition in a hierarchical distribution system. In addition, we find that firms that distribute elastic goods are likely to lower their prices to attract more buyers and move closer to their suppliers to save transport costs. In the case that the product demand is inelastic, intermediaries will move as close to their buyers as possible because they can maximize their profits in the SAM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]