The Impact of Human Factors on Word-of-MonthCommunications & Emotional Contagion in Market: an AgentbasedModeling

This paper models and simulates word-of-month communications & emotional contagion based on human factors, culture and personality.This paper studies one dimension of Hofstede's model of national culture: Individualism vs. Collectivism; and three dimensions of Big-Five theory of personality proposed by McCrae and Costa: Openness, Extraversion and Agreeableness. The model focuses on the essence ofhuman decision making which rooted in mood and emotion as two important drives for shaping and directing human behavior. Therefore,the core of the model is based on a module called Mental State Update which updates the mental state of the agent including moodand emotion. The model is verified by two scenarios which designed to investigate the agents’ decision process at the individual level as well asthe word-of-month communications & emotional contagion in the market in the context of Individualism-Collectivism culture for thesystem-level testing.

Keywords:

Agent-based simulation , Word of mouth (WOM)communications , Emotional Contagion modeling , Culture , Personality