New Directions in Migration Modeling

描述（由申请人提供）：基于主体的建模从根本上改变了社会科学的面貌，并正在公共卫生领域得到大力应用，例如，在公共卫生领域，ABMs已经取代微分方程，成为大规模传染病建模的选择方法。然而，与不断发展的流行病学领域不同的是，这一新的重要工具在很大程度上尚未触及移民问题。这似乎特别不幸，因为迁移似乎表现出已被证明适用于基于代理的方法的特征：个体是异质的（例如，在风险厌恶方面）；他们处于社会网络中，并根据来自其他网络成员（例如家庭）的不完全信息形成对迁移收益和成本的预期——也就是说，他们是有限理性的。移民显然是一个空间过程，而且（特别是当包括再移民时）是一个决定性的非平衡过程。这些正是适合“自底向上”智能体建模的问题的特征。因此，由于有证据表明，移民导致的人口分布变化影响了许多健康因素，社会和经济动态中心（CSED）提议在布鲁金斯学会举办为期一天的研讨会，一方面召集主要的移民专家，另一方面召集主要的基于主体的建模者，其具体目的是设计一个真正联合的应用健康相关研究议程。有证据表明，移民造成的人口分布变化影响到许多重要的人口、社会、经济和健康因素。因此，移民研究的进展可能为与移民引起的变化相关的卫生政策提供新的见解。基于代理的移民建模可能有助于这项任务，并可能为公共政策领导人提供一个重要的工具来分析和可能测试公共政策干预。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Agent-based modeling has fundamentally changed the face of social science and is being vigorously applied in public health, where, for example, ABMs have already displaced differential equations as the methodology of choice in large-scale infectious disease modeling. However, unlike the growing field of epidemiology, migration is as yet largely untouched by this new and important tool. This seems particularly unfortunate since migration would appear to exhibit features that have proven amenable to agent- based approaches: individuals are heterogeneous (e.g., in risk aversion); they are situated in social networks and form expectations about migration benefits and costs from imperfect information from other network members (e.g., family)-that is, they are boundedly rational. Migration is obviously a spatial process, and (particularly when one includes re-migration) is a decidedly non-equilibrium one. These are precisely the hallmarks of problems suitable for "bottom up" agent modeling. Therefore, since evidence suggests that changes in population distribution due to migration affect many health factors, the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics (CSED) proposes to host a daylong workshop at the Brookings Institution to assemble leading migration experts on the one hand, and leading agent-based modelers on the other, with the concrete purpose of designing a truly joint applied health-related research agenda going forward. Evidence suggests that changes in population distribution due to migration affect many important demographic, social, economic, and health factors. Therefore, advances in migration study can potentially offer new insights for health policy associated with migration-induced change. Agent-based Modeling of migration may assist in this task, and potentially provide public policy leaders an important tool to analyze and possibly test public policy interventions.