Social influence and water conservation: an agent-based approach

Every day, consumers are exposed to advertising campaigns that attempt to influence their decisions and affect their behavior. Word-of-mouth communication - the informal channels of daily interactions among friends, relatives, coworkers, neighbors, and acquaintances - plays a much more significant role in how consumer behavior is shaped, fashion is introduced, and product reputation is built. Macrolevel simulations that include this kind of social parameter are usually limited to generalized, often simplistic assumptions. In an effort to represent the phenomenon in a semantically coherent way and model it more realistically, we developed an influence-diffusion mechanism that follows agent-based social simulation primitives. The model is realized as a multiagent software platform, which we call Dawn (for distributed agents for water simulation).