A Model for Decision Making Under the Influence of an Artificial Social Network

Decision making and the social processes that influence it are of great importance to many problems. The ways people make decisions can determine whether a new technology is successful, whether resources are allocated optimality, or how society responds to a crisis. In this paper, we propose a model for how these decisions can be influenced using modern information technology and social networks. Specifically, we study the use of artificial social networks to make influential users that are desirable to society as a whole. In real life, this would be achieved by the publication of "best users" by the authority behind the artificial network. Graphically, this creates a set of temporary edges from those users to other users. We first develop a general model for an abstract, general case. We then apply it to a specific case study in a smart grid. Our results suggest that the proposed methodology has the potential to move the equilibrium of a system to a more desirable state and that the degree of the improvement, as well as other, graph-theoretic characteristics, depends on the mathematics of the decision being made.