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results on social dilemmas and public goods, as well as in psychological theory of
decision-making.
The HAPPenInGS theory was previously applied in in an agent-based model of a
case study in the context of climate change adaptation [1, 4, 5]. The case study inves-
tigates the role of local neighbourhood support as a supplement to public health care
during heat waves. Neighbourhood support is a public good which is locally provided
by volunteering activities of neighbourhood residents. Likewise, the benefits of the
public good emerge locally in the respective neighbourhood districts. The model
represents the collective dynamics of the provision of neighbourhood support in a
population of agents each behaviourally grounded in the HAPPenInGS theory and
initialised from large-scale socio-empirical data.
The work reported in the following sections of this paper abstracts from a particu-
lar case study context and presents a typical middle-range ABSS [6, 7] which repre-
sents the most important properties and dynamics of the problem domain while
remaining sufficiently abstract to allow for a systematic analysis of the collective
behavioural dynamics and macro-level patterns implied by the underlying theory and
model assumptions. With the model we aim to demonstrate what effect agent-level
balancing between possibly conflicting outcome preferences has on individual behav-
iours and perceptions, and on the level of the collectively provided public good.
Therefore, among the “Sixteen Reasons Other Than Prediction to Build Models” [8]
our goal is to “Illuminate Core Dynamics” [8].
The paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 gives a brief overview of the HAPPen-
InGS theory. Section 3 reports on the setup of the abstract agent-based model HAP-
PenInGS-A. The results of the dynamical analysis of the abstract ABSS are reported
in section 4. Section 5 concludes.
2
Actor Perspective: The HAPPenInGS theory
HAPPenInGS represents actor heterogeneity as subjective preferences that guide in-
dividual decision-making. HAPPenInGS states that an individual's decision about his
behaviour in the public good dilemma is based on a subjective appraisal of each of his
investment options with respect to his preference dimensions. The psychological theo-
retical foundation of decision-making in HAPPenInGS is the Theory of Planned Be-
haviour (TPB, [9]) with the extension of social value orientations, the latter being a
well introduced concept in experimental social dilemma research. The TPB concerns
the explanation and prediction of individual deliberative behaviour and is the most
widely applied social-psychological theory of human decision-making [10]. The the-
ory is unique in its empirical foundations and its numerical tractability. Furthermore,
the calculus involved is based on multi-attribute utility on the level of individual ac-
tors which offers a simple and straightforward means of implementation in ABSS
exercises.
HAPPenInGS covers three preference dimensions (stated in italics). Firstly, the at-
titude towards an investment option is represented in terms of the individual advan-
tage the decision-maker associates with the respective behaviour, i.e. the expected
