An Opinion Dynamics Model for the Diffusion of Innovations
Abstract
We study the dynamics of the adoption of new products by agents with continuous opinions and discrete actions (CODA). The model is such that the refusal in adopting a new idea or product is increasingly weighted by neighbor agents as evidence against the product. Under these rules, we study the distribution of adoption times and the final proportion of adopters in the population. We compare the cases where initial adopters are clustered to the case where they are randomly scattered around the social network and investigate small world effects on the final proportion of adopters. The model predicts a fat tailed distribution for late adopters which is verified by empirical data.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0809.5114,
title = {An Opinion Dynamics Model for the Diffusion of Innovations},
author = {Andre C. R. Martins and Carlos de B. Pereira and Renato Vicente},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0809.5114},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
14 pages, 8 figures, revised text, a new section with empirical evidence has been added