Multi-Agent Based Models of Social Contagion and Emergent Collective Behavior

A deeper understanding of emergence of global patterns in social systems such as diffusion of ideas, emergence of norms & conventions, higher organizations, collective wisdom and evolution of culture; through simple and predictable local interactions of individuals, has been a long quest for sociologists. Agent-based modeling is the latest approach which has virtually replaced the use of traditional techniques of equation based models & micro simulations for social systems analysis. This new paradigm, in addition to being applied to model & analyze various social systems, is also finding widespread application in diverse domains such as economics, business organizations and computational systems. The findings of agent-based models of social systems not only help obtaining a better understanding of the investigated phenomenon but also provide valuable inputs for design of agent-based computational formulations for solving different problems in varied domains. In this paper, we have tried to characterize the use of multi-agent based modeling approach of social contagion and emergent collective behavior along with our experimental work on neighbourhood aggregation model. The paper concludes with a short discussion of the relevant implications for multi-agent systems design.