Advancing Social Science through Agent-Based Modeling

Abstract

We discuss three issues in this chapter. First, we argue that agent-based models are necessary in social science. This also entails the contention that the more common ways of doing social science—the established methods of statistical analysis and the newer technique of data mining—are insufficient. Second, we advocate building into ABMs in social science the capability of choosing and combining theories or models. We argue that this will improve and accelerate theory advancement. Last, we discuss how to model the individual in ABMs in order to facilitate incorporation of theories choice and their combination.