Social gravity law widely exists in human travel, population migration, commodity trade, information communication, scientific collaboration and so on. Why is there such a simple law in many complex social systems is an interesting question. Although scientists from fields of statistical physics, complex systems, economics and transportation science have explained the social gravity law, a theoretical explanation including two dominant mechanisms, namely individual interaction and bounded rationality, is still lacking. Here we present a free utility model from the perspective of individual choice behavior to explain the social gravity law. The basic assumption is that bounded rational individuals interacting with each other will trade off the expected utility and information-processing cost to maximize their own utility. The previous explanations of the social gravity law including the maximum entropy model, the free cost model, the Logit model and the destination choice game model are all special cases under our model. Further, we extend the free utility model to the dummy network and real transportation network. This model not only helps us to better understand the underlying mechanisms of spatial interaction patterns in complex social systems, but also provides a new perspective for understanding the potential function in game theory and the user equilibrium model in transportation science.
Free utility model for explaining the social gravity law