Abstract

Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a versatile social scientific research tool that adapts insights from sociology and physics to study complex social systems. Currently, ABM is nearly absent from legal literature that evaluates and proposes laws and regulations to achieve various social goals. Rather, quantitative legal scholarship is currently most characterized by the Law and Economics (L&E) approach, which relies on a more limited modeling framework. The time is ripe for more use of ABM in this scholarship. Recent developments in legal theory have highlighted the complexity of society and law’s structural and systemic effects on it. ABM’s wide adoption as a method in the social sciences, including recently in economics, demonstrates its ability to address precisely these regulatory design issues.

Paper

Can be found here.

About the speaker

Sebastian Benthall is a (U.S.) National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences and a Senior Research Fellow at the Information Law Institute and New York University School of Law. He is developing heterogeneous agent modeling techniques to study the relationship between the economy of personal data, the real economy, and the financial system. He is also interested in software accountability and internet governance.

Practicalities

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