So You Got Two Ologies? The Challenge of Empirically Modelling Medical Prescribing Behaviour and Its Effect on Antimicrobial Resistance as a Case Study

This paper reports the early stages of a funded project “Antimicrobial Resistance as a Social Dilemma: Approaches to Reducing Broad-Spectrum Antibiotic Use in Acute Medical Patients Internationally” to use ABM in understanding how the prescribing behaviour of professionals in “medical institutions” may affect the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance (hereafter AMR), a situation in which standard treatments for infections fail. The first section explains the policy challenge of AMR and the research project strategy. The second section considers distinctive challenges raised by this kind of policy modelling. The third section presents preliminary results and the final section concludes.