Preface: Advances in Social Simulation - Looking in the Mirror
Summary
Since the first larger scale conferences in the early 1990s, social simulation has rapidly evolved into becoming a methodology known by researchers and practitioners in different areas including sociology, political science, economics, history, and ecology, to name a few. Each of these disciplines has to address what sociologists call the micro-macro link – how individual decision-making entities interact to produce effects at an aggregate level (emergence) while, at the same time, aggregate-level mechanisms and processes affect, enable, and limit the choices and/or behaviors of the individuals (immergence).
Addressing these dynamic processes using social simulation, in general, and agent-based modeling, in particular, has been proven successful for both research and application in, for instance, policy-making. The ability to zoom in on interacting individuals and zoom out to catch aggregate-level processes and patterns, while still able to systematically experiment with different parameters, is the key advantage of simulation over more analytical approaches.