Agent-Based Modeling and the Fallacies of Individualism

Agent-based modeling is showing great promise in the social sciences. However, two misconceptions about the relation between social macroproperties and microproperties afflict agent-based models. These lead current models to systematically ignore factors relevant to the properties they intend to model, and to overlook a wide range of model designs. Correcting for these brings painful trade-offs, but has the potential to transform the utility of such models.

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