Time: 2:00 - 3:00pm Venue: Eng. 2.09 Engineering Building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS
Title: Diffusion of innovation: Awareness, persuasion and adoption
Abstract: In the context of diffusion of innovations, I will illustrate a probabilistic model based on interacting populations connected through new communication channels such as Twitter and Facebook. The potential adopters differ in terms of connectivity and their taste for innovation. The proposed framework can model the different stages of the adoption process. In particular, the adoption curve is the result of a micro-founded decision process following the awareness phase. Eventually, I will show how to recover stylized facts pointed out by the extant literature in the field, such as delayed adoptions and non-monotonic adoption curves. I will also discuss how, in the future, relying on similar settings, it could be possible to model the diffusion of musical styles. The talk is mainly based on a joint work by C. Colapinto, E. Sartori and M. Tolotti (http://dx.medra.org/10.1016/j.physa.2013.10.001).
Bio: Marco Tolotti is Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics to Social Sciences at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. After finishing a Master in Mathematics at the University of Padua, he got the Master of Advanced Studies in Finance (ETH Zurich) and the PhD in Mathematical Finance (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa). Marco Tolotti’s research is mainly devoted to applications of probability theory to economics and finance (e.g., large deviations and limit theorems for modeling complex interacting systems: credit risk, systemic risk, imitative behavior in economics, diffusion of innovations, sequential market games). He gave invited talks in Melbourne (Monash), New York (Columbia), Sydney (UTS Business School), Berlin (Technische Universität), Klagenfurt (Alpen-Adria Universität), Firenze, Milano (Bocconi and Politecnico), Novara, Padova, Roma (Sapienza), Torino, Venezia, Verona.