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

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.