An agent-based model on scale-free networks for personal finance decisions

Personal finance decisions emerge from a complex network of human connections, where the nodes or agents — banks, investors, financial advisors — take their choices on the basis of a variety of factors. All these agents form a society, which we modeled as an Agent-Based Model (ABM) on a scalefree network. In this paper, we will consider: honest agents, regular agents, insincere agents, stubborn agents and skilled (or unskilled) agents. Honest agents report truthfully their opinion while insincere agents state an opinion which is different from their internal belief. Regular agents are characterized by the same propensity to listen, contrary to what stubborn agents do because these agents evaluate the counterpart’s opinion but never approaches to it. Skilled and unskilled agents are the result of influence of the competence in the evolution of decisions in multi-agent systems. We perform a social simulation to show that, in particular, consensus, polarization, extremism or the emergence of a disordered regime are possible outcomes, even without explicit introduction of stubborn agents.