Social scientists have observed that human behavior in society can often be modeled as corresponding to a threshold type policy. A new behavior would propagate by a procedure in which an individual adopts the new behavior if the fraction of his neighbors or friends having adopted the new behavior exceeds some threshold. In this paper we study the question of whether the emergence of threshold policies may be modeled as a result of some rational process which would describe the behavior of non-cooperative rational members of some social network. We focus on situations in which individuals take the decision whether to access or not some content, based on the number of views that the content has. Our analysis aims at understanding not only the behavior of individuals, but also the way in which information about the quality of a given content can be deduced from view counts when only part of the viewers that access the content are informed about its quality. In this paper we present a game formulation for the behavior of individuals using a meanfield model: the number of individuals is approximated by a continuum of atomless players and for which the Wardrop equilibrium is the solution concept. We derive conditions on the problem's parameters that result indeed in the emergence of threshold equilibria policies. But we also identify some parameters in which other structures are obtained for the equilibrium behavior of individuals.
The paper @cite_3 provides analysis of power law behavior for the rank distribution of contents; the distribution of most watched videos is found heavily skewed towards the most popular ones.
@cite_3
2137465421
A power law degree distribution is established for a graph evolution model based on the graph class of k-trees. This k-tree-based graph process can be viewed as an idealized model that captures some characteristics of the preferential attachment and copying mechanisms that existing evolving graph processes fail to model due to technical obstacles. The result also serves as a further cautionary note reinforcing the point of view that a power law degree distribution should not be regarded as the only important characteristic of a complex network, as has been previously argued [D. Achlioptas, A. Clauset, D. Kempe, C. Moore, On the bias of traceroute sampling, or power-law degree distribution in regular graphs, in: Proceedings of the 37th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC'05, 2005, pp. 694-703; L. Li, D. Alderson, J. Doyle, W. Willinger, Towards a theory of scale-free graphs: Definition, properties, and implications, Internet Mathematics 2 (4) (2005) 431-523; M. Mitzenmacher, The future of power law research, Internet Mathematics, 2 (4) (2005) 525-534].