Understanding Diffusion Behaviors Through Individual Characteristics
Résumé
Numerous diffusion models can be found in the literature. Although these models have
been widely used to address several problems related to diffusion phenomena at the individual
level, they do not faithfully represent the microscopic mechanisms that take place in the real
transmission processes. Today, the apparition of new communication media allows model to
go further by providing data on many real cases of diffusion. In particular, these new
approaches have shown that several dimensions involved in diffusion phenomena are not
present in current models. In our works, we focus on two original dimensions to address the
diffusion problem: the personality and the neutrality of the spreader. Our aim is to understand
the influence of these two dimensions regarding the diffusion behaviours. Our approach has
been used to study diffusion of messages related to several events occurred in January 2015.
The results obtained provide a new and interesting lighting on the heterogeneity of the
diffusion behaviors in function of personality and neutrality levels. This work provides a
methodology which may be useful in marketing strategies, for instance the analysis of the
features of individuals who talk about their touristic trips in Caribbean. Such an approach may
also be useful to understand diffusion and exchange behaviors in the Caribbean basin. From
an economic point of view, such an approach could be used for understanding the
expectations, targeting individuals and proposing tailored offers.