The current rate of production and consumption of meat poses a problem both to peoples’ health and to the environment. This work aims to develop a simulation of peoples’ meat consumption in Britain using agent-based modelling. The agents represent individual consumers. The key variables that characterise agents include sex, age, monthly income, perception of the living cost, and concerns about the impact of meat on the environment, health, and animal welfare. A process of peer influence is modelled with respect to the agents’ concerns. Influence spreads across two eating networks (i.e. co-workers and household members) depending on the time of day, day of the week, and agents’ employment status. Data from a representative sample of British consumers is used to empirically ground the model. Different experiments are run simulating interventions of the application of social marketing campaigns and a rise in price of meat. The main outcome is the mean weekly consumption of meat per consumer. A secondary outcome is the likelihood of eating meat. Analyses are run on the overall artificial population and by subgroups. The model succeeded in reproducing observed consumption patterns. Different sizes of effect on consumption emerged depending on the application of a social marketing strategy or a price increase. A price increase had a greater effect than environmental and animal welfare campaigns, while a health campaign had a larger impact on consumers’ behaviour than the other campaigns. An environmental campaign targeted at consumers concerned about the environment produced a boomerang effect increasing the consumption in the population rather than reducing it. The results of the simulation experiments are mainly consistent with the literature on food consumption providing support for future models of public strategies to reduce meat consumption.

中文翻译：

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基于Agent的英国消费者肉类消费行为模拟模型

当前肉的生产和消费速度对人们的健康和环境都构成了问题。这项工作旨在使用基于代理的模型来模拟英国人的肉类消费。代理商代表个人消费者。表征代理人特征的关键变量包括性别，年龄，月收入，生活成本感知以及对肉类对环境，健康和动物福利的影响的关注。对同伴影响的过程是针对代理人的关注进行建模的。影响力分布在两个饮食网络（即同事和家庭成员）中，具体取决于一天中的时间，星期几和代理商的工作状态。来自英国消费者的代表性样本的数据用于凭经验建立模型。进行了不同的实验来模拟社会营销活动的应用干预和肉类价格上涨。主要结果是每个消费者每周平均食用肉类。次要结果是吃肉的可能性。对总体人工种群和亚组进行分析。该模型成功地再现了观察到的消费模式。取决于社会营销策略或价格上涨的应用，出现了不同程度的消费影响。与环境和动物福利运动相比，价格上涨的影响更大，而与其他运动相比，健康运动对消费者行为的影响更大。针对关注环境的消费者的环保运动产生了飞旋镖效应，增加了人口的消费，而不是减少了消费。模拟实验的结果主要与食品消费文献一致，为未来减少肉类消费的公共策略模型提供了支持。