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.