Evaluations and Impact Assesments

What will happen to the local society if a large factory is build in one of two alternative locations? LOS baseline model includes population, firms, labor market, real estates and some other basic parts for most of the Norwegian municipalities. To asses an impact of an intervention, we add project-specific details and run alternative scenarios. As a result, we can estimate effects for specific social groups, changes in gender balance, press on the real estate market and so on. Changes spread through the society when people, organizations and their environment interact with each other. Some interactions between agents may lead to a tipping point, when incremental changes suddenly flip parts of the society. In addition, we can conduct sensitivity analysis, showing which factors the decision makers should pay most attention to.

Agent-based models may effectively asses some effects, that are hard to model otherwise. Since everything is simulated on the individual level, it is, for example, possible to asses effects of attitude changes.