Simulating Interacting Agents and Social Phenomena : The Second World Congress Agent based modeling and social simulation have emerged as an interdisciplinary area of social science that includes computational economics organizational science social dynamics and complex systems. This area contributes to enriching our understanding of the fundamental processes of social phenomena caused by complex interactions among agents. Bringing together diverse approaches to social simulation and research agendas this book presents a unique collection of contributions from the Second World Congress on Social Simulation held in 2008 at George Mason University in Washington DC USA. This book in particular includes articles on norms diffusion social networks economy markets and organizations computational modeling and programming environments providing new hypotheses and theories new simulation experiments compared with various data sets and new methods for model design and development. These works emerged from a global and interdisciplinary scientific community of the three regional scientific associations for social simulation: the North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science (NAACSOS now the Computational Social Science Society CSSS) the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA) and the Pacific Asian Association for Agent bBased Approach in Social Systems Sciences (PAAA).