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Towards Agent-Based Models of Rumours in Organizations: A Social Practice Theory Approach

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Part of the Springer Proceedings in Complexity book series (SPCOM)

Abstract

Rumour is a collective emergent phenomenon with a potential for provoking a crisis. Modelling approaches have been deployed since five decades ago; however, the focus was mostly on epidemic behaviour of the rumours which does not take into account the differences between agents. We use social practice theory to model agent decision-making in organizational rumourmongering. Such an approach provides us with an opportunity to model rumourmongering agents with a layer of cognitive realism and study the impacts of various intervention strategies for prevention and control of rumours in organizations.

Keywords

Rumour Organization Social practice theory Agent-based model 
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Notes

Contributions and Acknowledgement

Ebrahimi Fard and Mercuur wrote the first draft. Ebrahimi Fard provided the domain knowledge and collected most data, whereas Mercuur provided the meta-model and methodological knowledge. Dignum, Jonker and van der Walle supervised the process and contributed to the draft by providing comments, feedback and rewriting. This research was supported by the Engineering Social Technologies for a Responsible Digital Future project at TU Delft and ETH Zurich.

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© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Delft University of TechnologyDelftNetherlands

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