Title
Going Viral: Stability of Consensus-Driven Adoptive Spread
Abstract
The spread of new products in a networked population is often modeled as an epidemic. However, in the case of “complex” contagion, these models do not capture nuanced, dynamic social reinforcement effects in adoption behavior. In this paper, we investigate a model of complex contagion which allows a coevolutionary interplay between adoption, modeled as an SIS epidemic spreading process, and social reinforcement effects, modeled as consensus opinion dynamics. Asymptotic stability analysis of the all-adopt as well as the none-adopt equilibria of the combined opinion-adoption model is provided through the use of Lyapunov arguments. In doing so, sufficient conditions are provided which determine the stability of the “flop” state, where no one adopts the product and everyone's opinion of the product is least favorable, and the “hit” state, where everyone adopts and their opinions are most favorable. These conditions are shown to extend to the bounded confidence opinion dynamic under a stronger assumption on the model parameters. Additional analysis is provided for the case where the product is neither a hit nor a flop. To conclude, numerical simulations demonstrate behaviors indicated in the sociology literature such as tipping points.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TNSE.2019.2952986
IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Epidemic processes,opinion dynamics,complex contagion,stability analysis.
Journal
7
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
2327-4697
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.36
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sebastian F. Ruf110.36
Keith Paarporn211.71
Philip E. Pare3147.53