SimPastoralist

Play SimPastoralist →   ·   SimPastoralist 2 (work in progress) →

SimPastoralist is a 10-year pastoralist simulation. Each year, players decide how many goats to keep and how much insurance to buy. Good rains mean milk income and herd growth; bad rains mean losses unless insurance pays out. Households also have to cover food and school fees.

I built the original Kivy version on a tablet to play with 387 couples across 34 sessions in Samburu County, Kenya, as part of a randomized study of how insurance framing affects demand. Half the sessions used the standard “protect-your-livestock” framing; the other half emphasized that payouts could also cover household consumption and school fees. Women bought more under the flexible framing, men more under the livestock framing — consistent with theory about who bears which risks within the household.

The web port runs the same model in the browser. SimPastoralist 2 is an updated sequel I’m building with Claude Code — still a work in progress, but playable.

Working paper: Insuring the Family or the Asset? The Impact of Product Framing on Demand (under review at The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance).