The Evolution of Users' Adoption Behavior under a Collaborative Service: An Agent-Based Computational Approach

Abstract

As a relatively new collaborative service mode, Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) is gaining ever greater popularity. MIM users interact within a complex system to influence others' adoption decisions, thus resulting in behavioral evolution. An agent-based computational approach is a methodology well suited to the simulation of this complex system. In this study, we build an agent-based computational model driven by empirical data. The model can present the evolution of the adoption of MIM. We also conduct simulation experiments to examine how some social and economic factors affect the behavioral evolution of the adoption of MIM. The results indicate that the average degree of nodes in a network has a significant effect on behavioral evolution in comparison with brand intensity. In contrast to the perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and perceived entertainment value, the perceived cost and inter-operability has a lesser degree of influence on the adoption behavior. The different compositions of various groups have significantly different effects on the evolution of MIM adoption behavior.