Influence of local information on social simulations under the small-world model

Abstract

Watts and Strogatzs "small world model" of disordered networks is becoming an increasingly popular research tool for modeling human society. As part of this approach, local information mechanisms (landscape properties) are used to approximate real-world conditions in social simulations. The authors investigate the influence of local information on social simulations that are performed using the small world model. In addition to defining local information, we use a cellular automata variation with added shortcuts as a test platform for simulating the spread of an epidemic and examining various influences. We believe our results will help future researchers determine appropriate simulation parameters.