Uncovering Salience-Driven Dynamics in Consumer Confidence with Generative Social Simulation

Consumer confidence is typically modeled as a persistent macroeconomic index, yet its movements arise from households that interpret economic information through heterogeneous constraints, exposures, prior beliefs, and attention. We introduce ConsumerSim, a generative Human--Environment response framework that reconstructs Consumer Confidence Index (CCI) dynamics from a microdata-calibrated synthetic population, time-stamped macroeconomic, financial, policy, and news signals, survey-like response generation, post-stratified belief expansion, and behavioral inertia alignment. Across U.S., EU27,