Word of Mouth, Viral Marketing and Open Data: A Large-Scale Simulation for Predicting Opinion Diffusion on Ethical Food Consumption

This paper presents the first results of a large-scale-Agent-Based Simulation devoted to simulate individual behaviour inside a medium sized city (600,000 inhabitants). Humans are simulated as Intelligent Individual entities characterized by several attributes created from the Open Data available by means of a multi-layer approach. The work presented is divided into two main parts: the first part aims to describe the multi-layer approach adopted with the inclusion of the social network layer devoted to capture how social networks can be correlated with human activities and how an “Individual Opinion” can changes based on social interactions. The second part is devoted to present a preliminary case study for simulating the propagation dynamics of the individual opinion in the form of an ethical value function. The basic idea is to capture the changes in the individual opinion based on the social interactions predicted by the simulation. Finally, a food choice model for predicting individual choices based on the individual opinion function is presented; the model is based on three parameters: accessibility of ethical shops, price difference with standard products, and ethical value propagation.