How to use agent-based models?
Models are tools for communication, education, exploration and experimentation. Models are not holy tools for prediction, especially not for non-linear systems. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misunderstanding about models. People who are not very familiar with them have sometimes high expectations of the details that are included. A common critique of non-modelers is that more details need to be included. But more details might only make the model less useful for exploration of the parameter space. The goal is to make “the models as simple as possible, but no simpler than that”.
