Human Decision Making In Empirical Agent-Based Models: Pitfalls And Caveats For Land-Use Change Policies

This paper describes three fundamental pitfalls or
caveats of empirical modeling of land-use decision
making in agent-based models for land-use/cover
change. A case study in the villages of Jambi Province
(Sumatra), Indonesia, is presented to demonstrate the
construction of empirical decision-making models
using utility functions while taking into account these
caveats. Incorporating the decision process as an
option to deal with the drawbacks of cross-sectional
data is recommended to better specify agents’ behavior
in the decision-making models.