Agent-based Modeling for the Study of Diffusion Dynamics of Network Technologies

Abstract

In the modern world the internet is by all accounts an incredible success, but inspite of this success, its deficiencies have come under increasing scrutiny and triggered calls for new architectures to succeed it. Those architectures however face a formidable incumbent in the internet and likely to depend equally on technical superiority as an economic factors. Recently, economic models have been proposed to study adoption dynamics of entrant and incumbent technologies motivated by the need for new network architectures to complement the current Internet. Diffusion is a process in which the new products and practices into society along with inventions are successfully introduced. Many studies of the diffusion of individual innovations exist and exhibit some similarities such as the famous S-shaped diffusion curve. New ideas, products innovations often take time to diffuse, a fact that is often attributed to some form of heterogeneity among people. The diffusion process enhances an innovation through the feedback of information about its utility across different users that can be use to improve it. This aspect is common to the micro-macro loop which is an essential part of emergent dynamics. The present paper a model for the adoption of computing network technologies by individual users is formulated and solved.