In this paper, we are interested in modeling diffusion of innovations on social networks. We focus on a scenario where innovation emerges at a small number of nodes in the society, and each individual needs certain portion of his neighbors (thresholds) to adopt the innovation before he does so. We analyze the dynamics of the diffusion process under deterministic topologies and threshold values....

To explore the space between the theories of the Diffusion of Innovations and Universal Darwinism, we first examine a case study of the history of the greenhouse horticulture sector of the Netherlands, comparing and contrasting the narrow focus of Diffusion of Innovations and the wider focus of Universal Darwinism. We then build an agent-based model using elements of both in order to test how w...

What causes a government to adopt a new program or policy? Despite a large number of empirical studies available to date, the relative importance of various determinants remains obscure because of difficulties of statistical identification. We present an experimental setting to study the diffusion of policy innovations in the laboratory. Our approach discriminates between experimentation, exper...

Axelrod’s model for the dissemination of culture contains two key factors required to model the process of diffusion of innovations, namely, social influence (i.e., individuals become more similar when they interact) and homophily (i.e., individuals interact preferentially with similar others). The strength of these social influences are controlled by two parameters: F , the number of features ...

This paper determines how different network structures influence the diffusion of innovations. We develop a model of diffusion where: 1. an individual’s decision to adopt a new technology is influenced by his contacts; and 2. contacts can discuss, coordinate, and make adoption decisions together. A measure of connectedness, ‘cohesion’, determines diffusion. A cohesive community is defined as a ...

In recent years, complexity theory has been shown to throw light on a number of issues related to the management of organizations. Examples include the use of complexity notions to help understand situations such as mergers and acquisitions and assist in the successful facilitation of these events by suggesting appropriate enabling infrastructures (Mitleton-Kelly 2004). Complexity theory has si...

Lehoux and colleagues plea for a health systems perspective to evaluate innovations. Since many innovations and their scale-up strategies emerge from processes that are not (centrally) steered, we plea for any assessment with a dynamic, instead of a sequential, approach. We provide further guidance on how to adopt such dynamic approach, in order to better un-derstand an...

We propose a probabilistic cellular automata model for the spread of innovations, rumors, news, etc. in a social system. The local rule used in the model is outertotalistic, and the range of interaction can vary. When the range R of the rule increases, the takeover time for innovation increases and converges toward its mean-field value, which is almost inversely proportional to R when R is larg...

We consider processes in which new technologies and forms of behavior are transmitted through social or geographic networks. Agents adopt behaviors based on a combination of their inherent payoff and their local popularity (the number of neighbors who have adopted them) subject to some random error. We characterize the long-run dynamics of such processes in terms of the geometry of the network,...

Physics Education Research (PER) is currently facing significant difficulties in disseminating research-based knowledge and instructional strategies to other faculty. Co-teaching is a promising and cost-effective alternative to traditional professional development that may be applicable in many situations. This paper discusses the rationale for coteaching and our initial experience with co-teac...