Abstract
In his seminal 1957 paper, Orcutt foresaw that microsimulation models comprising “various sorts of interacting units which receive inputs and generate outputs” (Orcutt, 1957, p. 117) could be built and used to test “what would happen given specified external conditions and governmental actions” (Orcutt, 1957, p. 122). More recently Keuschnigg, Lovsjo, and Hedstrom (2018) have drawn attention to the affinities between analytical sociology and computational social science, thus making the connection between the earlier insight of Orcutt and the modern discipline of sociology. In a similar fashion we see the potential of computational techniques for sociology; thus, microsimulation is a methodological approach located at this intersection where social mechanisms can be computationally modelled using extensive microdata within a virtual environment.
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Davis, P., Lay-Yee, R. (2019). Simulation. In: Simulating Societal Change. Computational Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04786-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04786-3_7
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