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Scientific Background : Rural sociology, innovation diffusion and multi-agent models 

The AEMs studied in the project are designed under the 2078/92 regulation (Links to governmental web sites about agri-environmental measures). They include a variety of objectives : biodiversity conservation, landscape improvement and maintenance, input reduction, conversion to organic farming. Moreover, the modelling work must face another source of diversity : the multi-disciplinary nature of the sources of the scientific background, which involves three main components:

• Rural economics and sociology bring an essential background about farmers behaviour, values, specific way of life. The economic utility and the specific constraints of different farming systems, although not the main focus of the project, cannot be ignored (see : Literature review for more information, To load the document (pdf format 276ko) ; see presentation of this research in the final report).

• Innovation diffusion research, which studies how new ideas or behaviours are communicated in a social system. These researches begun in the thirties and studied the correlation between the adoption and several individual characteristics . More recently, these studies use the concepts coming from the sociology of networks, and focus on the influence of local interactions.(see presentation of this research in the final report)

• Agent based modelling is a very general modelling approach, coming from computer science, which aims at modelling large models by the specification of distributed interacting, autonomous components. It is more and more commonly used to test various hypotheses in social sciences. Various options for modelling individual behaviour are investigated, from simple automata or standard economic utility maximisation to very elaborated models referring to researches in the psychology of decision making (see presentation of this research in the final report).

The multi-disciplinary nature of the research is an important aspect of the project. This is one asset of models to offer the possibility to integrate different disciplinary views in the same coherence.

Last updated : 04/02/02. Page maintainer : Clarisse Mantonnier (CEMAGREF - LISC)