The Impact of Human Factors on Word-of-Month Communications & Emotional Contagion in Market: an Agent-based Modeling

Zahra Sadeqi Arani¹ Mohamad Reza Mehregan² Mohamad Aboie Ardakan³ Mohsen Nazari⁴ Omid Roozmand⁵

1) PhD Candidate in operation research, Tehran University, Iran Email:
2) Full Professor, Department of management, Tehran University, Iran Email:
3) Professor, Department of management, Tehran University, Iran Email:
4) Professor, Department of management, Tehran University, Iran Email:
5) Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Engineering, Shahreza University, Esfahan, Iran Email:

Publication : 2nd International Conference on Management and Social Science(2icmsconf.com)
Abstract :
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 of human 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 mood and emotion. The model is verified by two scenarios which designed to investigate the agents’ decision process at the individual level as well as the word-of-month communications & emotional contagion in the market in the context of Individualism-Collectivism culture for the system-level testing.
Keywords : Agent-based simulation Word of mouth (WOM) communications Emotional Contagion modeling Culture Personality.