An Analysis of Word-of-Mouth Effects on Social Networks

Setsuya Kurahashi and Muneyoshi Saito

In this paper, we discuss how the neighbors affect the decision of consumer behavior over diffusion of innovation. We suggest an agent-based model of diffusion and showed that on an online social network which have both of ”scale-free” and ”small world” properties, 1) the informative effect can cause a takeoff, but it is not sufficient to reach the completion of diffusion. 2) Meanwhile, the combination of the informative and normative effects can easily bring a takeoff before accelerating the diffusion and reaching the completion in the end. 3) The informative effect makes information propagate fast over a “scale-free” network, and so does the normative effect over a highly clustered network. The traits and the paths of information propagation actually differ.

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