Construction of a Simulation Model Regarding People’s Reactions to the Stay-at-Home Request Policy During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Japan and Evaluation Using Linear Regression Analysis

This study aimed to identify the factors that lead to accepting policies that require behavioral changes to continuously maintain the common good in society. In this study, we have developed an agent simulation model that considers the depth of thinking regarding others and predicts people’s responses to stay-at-home requests in 47 prefectures in Japan. The average age and depth of things regarding others and the Extraversion of Big Five Personality traits greatly influenced predicting the Sum of the Voluntary Curfew Index. In particular, this study found a negative correlation between the average age and the people’s response to a stay-at-home request during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan and a positive correlation with extraversion, contrary to the findings of a previous study (Götz et al. 2021). In addition, the depth of thinking regarding others was shown to influence people’s responses to policies in the case of stay-at-home requests. In this study, we calibrated the results of the agent simulation using real-world data and confirmed the significance of the parameters used in the model using linear regression analysis. We believe that the combination of agent simulation and data analysis improves the validity of the model.