The new book Modeling Populations of Adaptive Individuals is now for sale from Princeton University Press.

This book, by Steven Railsback and Bret Harvey, is in the Princeton Monographs in Population Biology series. The publisher’s web site is here. 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 is tightly integrated with the concepts and techniques advocated in Agent-based and Individual-based Modeling and is intended as a companion volume for modelers using adaptive behavior.