Online Archive of University of Virginia Scholarship
An Agent-Based Model of Social Impact with Bayesian Updating Rules1142 views
Author
Eshera, Osama, Systems Engineering - School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia
Advisors
Learmonth, Gerard, Department of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Virginia
Abstract
The process of social influence and individual opinion formation can aptly be constructed as a complex adaptive system. Individual people formulate their opinions through some unknown process that considers social pressure and their own individual agency. What emerges from this process is a global opinion distribution, or "public opinion," that is a nonlinear epiphenomena of local agent action. Opinion dynamics models postulate simple agent rules that approximate this unknown local process so as to generate global behavior mimicking observed phenomena. This proposal is concerned with the development of an agent-based network model of social impact that (1) considers variation in the way different agents respond to social influence (2) allows agents a Bayesian updating procedure and (3) employs a network topology that is a better approximation of social networks than random graphs.
Degree
MS (Master of Science)
Language
English
Rights
All rights reserved (no additional license for public reuse)
Eshera, Osama. An Agent-Based Model of Social Impact with Bayesian Updating Rules. University of Virginia, Systems Engineering - School of Engineering and Applied Science, MS (Master of Science), 2015-04-21, https://doi.org/10.18130/V31T2N.
