Knowledge diffusion based on social relationship network

摘要

The process of knowledge diffusion is a decision-making process through which information about knowledge move from one adopter to another, and then the adopters assess the value of knowledge to decide that whether accept it or not. Due to the cognitive ambiguity about new knowledge, the social relation network will play a very important role for the potential adopters' decision-making. So, based on social relationship network and utility threshold function, a new model is proposed to study how these factors such as social structural level, social word-of-mouth and social credit level affect the speed and extent of knowledge diffusion. Simulation results indicated that: Firstly, the higher the social structural level is, the higher the speed and extent of knowledge diffusion is, Secondly, the negative effect of word-of-mouth will slow down the speed and extend of diffusion. The more the adopters with negative word-of-mouth are, the greater the trend will be. Thirdly, not considering the cost of rebuilding the relation between different agents, the fixed relation structure with high credit will lead to incomplete diffusion. On the contrary, the unsteady relation structure with low credit will make full diffusion because of its more flexible information acquisition.