Balancing the criticisms: Validating multi-agent models of social systems

Using multi-agent models to study social systems has attracted criticisms because of the challenges involved in their validation. Common criticisms that we have encountered are described, and for each one we attempt to give a balanced perspective of the criticism. A model of intra-state conflict is used to help demonstrate these points. We conclude that multi-agent models for social systems are most useful when (1) the connection between micro-behaviors and macro-behaviors are not well-understood and (2) when data collection from the real-world system is prohibitively expensive in terms of time or money or if it puts human lives at risk.