New Evolutionary Adoption Model for Innovation Diffusion

Abstract

The study of innovation diffusion offers an insight into its adoption by a particular community, which has attracted the attention of many researchers. However, most of proposed models do not take all the fundamental elements for simulating the diffusion process into account. The main contribution of this article is proposing an original model founded on the evolutionary algorithm. The model simulates the adoption decision as a process of gradual acceptance and focuses on the representation of (1) the innovation features (2) the individuals' heterogeneity, (3) the social network (4) the communication influence. For this purpose, different simulation scenarios were carried out using a probabilistic foundation. The results validated the model's ability to determine the earlier adopters and therefore, demonstrated an explicit diffusion pattern without the need of historical data.