Preference evolution model based on Wechat-like interactions

摘要

Wechat as a communication tool has become very popular in recent years and is frequently used in communicating the opinions, preferences and sentiments. The increasing communication through Wechat makes it feasible for people change their preferences over time. As a result, the preferences of people will be dynamically evolved in a Wechat context. The aim of this paper to develop a preference evolution model based on Wechat-like interactions which captures the main characteristics of Wechat interactions. In the developed model, we propose the methods for updating the opinions and connections of agents. Then, some desirable properties in the preference evolution model are presented to discuss the conditions for forming different patterns of stabilized opinions. Furthermore, by taking different bounded confidences and different probabilities for rewiring and breaking the connections into considerations, we design the simulation experiments to investigate their influences on the preference evolutions, and provide explanations of the observations obtained.