Paul Bufort
Independent researcher. With an open agent-based simulator, I study how a costly practice spreads, or fails to spread, in organisations made of small, dense teams.
Research
Extended abstract · accepted as a poster at COMPLEX NETWORKS 2026 · Granada, 2–4 December 2026
Where should an organisation place the first adopters of a costly new practice: together in a few dense teams, or spread across many? In simulated modular organisations, dispersing them spreads the practice further; concentrating them sustains it when people often drop practices that their colleagues do not use.
Synthetic data An uncalibrated model of simulated organisations; not a forecast.
About
I am an independent researcher. This work started from a practical question: when an organisation wants a costly practice to spread, should it concentrate the first adopters in a few dense teams, or disperse them across teams? To study it, I built adoption-sim, an open simulator of complex contagion on synthetic two-tier organisations, and logged every modelling decision, with its alternatives, in a public decision log.
The code, the decision log and the reproduction pipeline are public. The two confirmatory families were pre-specified in that log after an exploratory panel, and every reported estimate is machine-extracted from the versioned results and checked by an audit script. Criticism is the most useful thing you can send me.