Introspective Agents in Opinion Formation Modeling to Predict Social Market

Abstract

Individuals may change their opinion in effect of a wide range of factors like interaction with peer groups, governmental policies and personal intentions. Works in this area mainly focus on individuals in social network and their interactions while neglect other factors. In this paper we have introduced an opinion formation model that consider the internal tendency as a personal feature of individuals in social network. In this model agents may trust, distrust or be neutral to their neighbors. They modify their opinion based on the opinion of their neighbors, trust/distrust to them while considering the internal tendency. The results of simulation show that this model can predict the opinion of social network especially when the average of nodal degree and clustering coefficient are high enough. Since this model can predict the preferences of individuals in market, it can be used to define marketing and production strategy.