A causality analysis framework for analyzing the retail consumer behavior change in COVID-19 pandemic

The pandemic of COVID-19 has leveraged many aspects in social life around the world. The number of infected people in Indonesia has passed 1.000.000 cases and still getting increased. The Government enforces regulations to minimize the transmission rate of the virus, namely, health protocol. One of the three pillars of health protocol is applying physical distancing and avoiding crowds. The policies have caused the community to significantly reduce activities outside due to their fear of being infected. This condition encourages the change in people’s shopping behavior, especially for daily necessities. This study aims to model shopping behavior change for daily needs or retail products before and after the pandemic. The whole research will focus on modeling the retail consumer behavior change leveraged by the pandemic using Agent-Based Simulation. In this study, the conceptual model for the observed system was mainly built as an essential input for the Agent-Based Simulation in future research. Some relevant and significant variables within the system were identified and being analyzed for constructing the conceptual model. The final results of this study are expected to present a causality analysis framework as the conceptual model that explains the causality of consumer behavior change.