Noble, Jason, Eric Silverman, Jakub Bijak, Stuart Rossiter, Maria Evandrou, Seth Bullock, Athina Vlachantoni, and Jane Falkingham. “Linked lives: the utility of an agent-based approach to modeling partnership and household formation in the context of social care.” In Proceedings of the 2012 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) , pp. 1-12. IEEE, 2012.
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The UK’s population is aging, which presents a challenge as older people are the primary users of health and social care services. We present an agent-based model of the basic demographic processes that impinge on the supply of, and demand for, social care: namely mortality, fertility, health-status transitions, internal migration, and the formation and dissolution of partnerships and households. Agent-based modeling is used to capture the idea of “linked lives” and thus to represent hypotheses that are impossible to express in alternative formalisms. Simulation runs suggest that the per-taxpayer cost of state-funded social care could double over the next forty years. A key benefit of the approach is that we can treat the average cost of state-funded care as an outcome variable, and examine the projected effect of different sets of assumptions about the relevant social processes.