Mathematical modeling of innovation diffusion has attracted strong academic interest since the early 1960s. Traditional diffusion models have aimed at empirical generalizations and hence describe the spread of new products parsimoniously at the market level. More recently, agent-based modeling and simulation has increasingly been adopted since it operates on the individual level and, thus, can capture complex emergent phenomena highly relevant in diffusion research. Agent-based methods have been applied in this context both as intuition aids that facilitate theory-building and as tools to analyze real-world scenarios, support management decisions and obtain policy recommendations. This review addresses both streams of research. We critically examine the strengths and limitations of agent-based modeling in the context of innovation diffusion, discuss new insights agent-based models have provided, and outline promising opportunities for future research. The target audience of the paper includes both researchers in marketing interested in new findings from the agent-based modeling literature and researchers who intend to implement agent-based models for their own research endeavors. Accordingly, we also cover pivotal modeling aspects in 123 184 E. Kiesling et al. depth (concerning, e.g., consumer adoption behavior and social influence) and outline existing models in sufficient detail to provide a proper entry point for researchers new to the field.

No abstract

Managing privacy and understanding handling of personal data has turned into a fundamental right, at least within the European Union, with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) being enforced since May 25 th 2018. This has led to tools and services that promise compliance to GDPR in terms of consent management and keeping track of personal data being processed. The information recorded within such tools, as well as that for compliance itself, needs to be interoperable to provide sufficient transparency in its usage. Additionally, interoperability is also necessary towards addressing the right to data portability under GDPR as well as creation of user-configurable and manageable privacy policies. We argue that such interoperability can be enabled through agreement over vocabularies using linked data principles. The W3C Data Privacy Vocabulary and Controls Community Group (DPVCG) was set up to jointly develop such vocabularies towards interoperability in the context of data privacy. This paper presents the resulting Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV), along with a discussion on its potential uses, and an invitation for feedback and participation.

This paper introduces an evolving cybersecurity knowledge graph that integrates and links critical information on real-world vulnerabilities, weaknesses and attack patterns from various publicly available sources. Cybersecurity constitutes a particularly interesting domain for the development of a domain-specific public knowledge graph, particularly due to its highly dynamic landscape characterized by timecritical, dispersed, and heterogeneous information. To build and continually maintain a knowledge graph, we provide and describe an integrated set of resources, including vocabularies derived from well-established standards in the cybersecurity domain, an ETL workflow that updates the knowledge graph as new information becomes available, and a set of services that provide integrated access through multiple interfaces. The resulting semantic resource offers comprehensive and integrated up-todate instance information to security researchers and professionals alike. Furthermore, it can be easily linked to locally available information, as we demonstrate by means of two use cases in the context of vulnerability assessment and intrusion detection.

Discrete multi-criteria decision problems with numerous Pareto-efficient solution candidates place a significant cognitive burden on the decision maker. An interactive, aspiration-based search process that iteratively progresses toward the most preferred solution can alleviate this task. In this paper, we study three ways of representing such problems in a DSS, and compare them in a laboratory experiment using subjective and objective measures of the decision process as well as solution quality and problem understanding. In addition to an immediate user evaluation, we performed a re-evaluation several weeks later. Furthermore, we consider several levels of problem complexity and user characteristics. Results indicate that different problem representations have a considerable influence on search behavior, although long-term consistency appears to remain unaffected. We also found interesting discrepancies between subjective evaluations and objective measures. Conclusions from our experiments can help designers of DSS for large multi-criteria decision problems to fit problem representations to the goals of their system and the specific task at hand.