A study of the influence of different opinion leaders on the evolution of followers' views in social e-commerce networks

In the recently emerged social e-commerce platforms, online opinion leaders play a crucial role. Based on the finite trust model in opinion dynamics and combined with the actual situation of social e-commerce platforms and research literature, this paper divides opinion leaders into ‘Big-V’ type opinion leaders and authoritative opinion leaders, and divides followers into ordinary followers and fans, and constructs different opinion leaders in social e-commerce networks based on bounded trust and self-confidence degrees - the follower opinion evolution model. The influence of different opinion leaders on the evolution of followers' views is explored through multi-agent simulation. It is found that opinion leaders play an important role in the aggregation of views, and the breadth of follower coverage of ‘Big-V’ type opinion leaders makes them more influential and able to gain more strong supporters than authority-type opinion leaders.