Simulated Social Networks and Partner Search: Linking Social Interactions and Demographic Outcomes

Demographic change is a product of a complex web of social interactions. These interactions inform, motivate and facilitate demographic events such as family formation, childbearing and migration, and the social fabric on which these interactions take place has the form of a network defining links between individuals. Agent-based simulation modelling can formalise this link between network interactions and demographic outcomes and furthermore allows the systematic testing of the plausibility of hypotheses about how the two are linked. This paper describes results from a simulation model of interaction over a dynamic social network, in which agents have incomplete, evolving and falsifiable preferences as to potential partners.