Assess the sensitivity of simulated school non-attendance to its modeling assumptions

Establish how the simulated increase in school non-attendance under the inciting counselor-AI style changes when the non-attendance threshold is varied or when the absorbing threshold rule is replaced by a probabilistic absence model driven by stress and happiness.

Background

In the simulation, a student agent enters an absorbing non-attendance state whenever its happiness reaches zero. The authors state that this is a simulation state rather than an empirical model of actual school refusal, which in reality depends on multiple psychological and environmental factors.

The authors explicitly acknowledge that the reported increase in non-attendance under the inciting style may be an artifact of this fixed absorbing-state definition. They therefore leave unresolved whether the qualitative result persists under alternative thresholds or under a probabilistic absence mechanism incorporating stress and happiness.