Modeling opinion leader's role in the diffusion of innovation
This work is incremental, applying an existing method to a new platform for potential benefits in social science modeling.
The authors translated an existing agent-based model about opinion leaders in innovation diffusion to the GAMA platform to demonstrate that using new platform features can enhance the explanatory power of simulation results in social sciences.
The diffusion of innovations is an important topic for the consumer markets. Early research focused on how innovations spread on the level of the whole society. To get closer to the real world scenarios agent based models (ABM) started focusing on individual-level agents. In our work we will translate an existing ABM that investigates the role of opinion leaders in the process of diffusion of innovations to a new, more expressive platform designed for agent based modeling, GAMA. We will do it to show that taking advantage of new features of the chosen platform should be encouraged when making models in the field of social sciences in the future, because it can be beneficial for the explanatory power of simulation results.