Reflexive phenomena are usually understood in the social sciences as processes that a ect themselves recursively.This stems from the mutual altering relationship between participants and the social process they belong to: participants can change the course of the process with their actions and a new state during the evolution of the process can lead to a change in its participants' behavior.This article proposes an agent-based model of di usion of innovations in a social network to study reflexivity.In this model, agents decide to adopt a new product according to a utility function that depends on two kinds of social influences.First, there is a local influence exerted on an agent by her closest neighbors that have already adopted, and also by herself if she feels the product suits her personal needs.Second, there is a global influence which leads agents to adopt when they become aware of emerging trends happening in the system.For this, we endow agents with a reflexive capacity that allows them to recognize a trend, even if they can not perceive a significant change in their neighborhood.Results reveal the appearance of slowdown periods along the adoption rate curve, in contrast with the classic stylized bell-shaped behavior.Results also show that network structure plays an important role in the e ect of reflexivity: while some structures (e.g., scale-free networks) may amplify it, others (e.g., small-world structure) weaken such an e ect.The contribution of this work lies in the inclusion of evolving cognitive distinctions as agents decide product adoption in di usion processes.
Tópico:
University-Industry-Government Innovation Models
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FuenteJournal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation