An agent-based approach to modeling online social influence

  • Authors:
  • Peter-Paul van Maanen;Bob van der Vecht

  • Affiliations:
  • Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), The Netherlands and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands;Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

The aim of this study is to better understand social influence in online social media. Therefore, we propose a method in which we implement, validate and improve an individual behavior model. The behavior model is based on three fundamental behavioral principles of social influence from the literature: 1) liking, 2) social proof and 3) consistency. We have implemented the model using an agent-based modeling approach. The multi-agent model contains the social network structure, individual behavior parameters and the scenario that are obtained from empirical data. The model is validated by comparing the output of the multi-agent simulation with empirical data. We demonstrate the method by evaluating five versions of behavior models applied to the use case of Twitter behavior about a talent show on Dutch television.