The Impact of Agent-Based Models in the Social Sciences after 15 Years of Incursions

This paper provides an overview on the impact of agent-based models in the social sciences. It focuses on the reasons why agent-based models are seen as important innovations in the recent decades. It is aimed to evaluate the impact of this innovation on various disciplines, such as economics, sociology, anthropology, and behavioural sciences. It discusses the advances it contributed to achieve and illustrates some comparatively new fields to which it gave rise. Finally, it emphasizes some research issues that need to be addressed in the future.