Forthcoming book on theory for tradeoff decisions in individual-based models

Steven Railsback and Bret Harvey will be publishing the book Modeling  Populations of Adaptive Individuals in the Princeton University Press Monographs in Population Biology series.

The book discusses individual/agent-based modeling of systems in which the individuals make adaptive tradeoff decisions, e.g., between the benefits of seeking food and the risks of becoming food for others. The focus is on “state- and prediction-based theory”, an approach that combines the general concepts of fitness/objective optimization with explicit assumptions about prediction and approximations that make the theory extremely flexible, realistic, computationally tractable, and still capable of producing good decisions. The book should be published in late 2019.