A Hybrid Mechanism for Innovation Diffusion in Social Networks

Abstract

Innovation diffusion is the process of adopting novel things, which is deemed as the diffusion of human behaviors. Previous studies mainly posit an unclear distinction with information diffusion. However, there exist critical differences in both social and economic areas. Inspired by this observation, we propose a practical method for innovation diffusion based on the process of behavior diffusion, which integrates threshold model with social imitation strategy. The primary goal of our proposed model is to combine individuals' economic as well as social characteristics to study innovation diffusion. The interplay of these two strategies is studied in the context of a coordination game. According to the simulation results on Erdös-Rényi random networks and small-world networks, we find that the conjunction of these two approaches can greatly improve the efficiency of innovation diffusion. In addition, we further study the impacts of varied initial seeds' selection strategies on the overall performance of innovation diffusion using our proposed model.

Keywords

• Innovation diffusion
• threshold model
• social imitation
• coordination game