{"title":"Can social contagion spread without key players?","authors":"Gizem Korkmaz, C. Kuhlman, F. Vega-Redondo","doi":"10.1109/BESC.2016.7804473","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Contagion models have been used to study the spread of social behavior among agents of a population, such as information diffusion, social influence, and participation to collective action (e.g., protests). Key players, which are typically high-degree, -k-core or -centrality agents in a networked population, are considered important for spreading social contagions. In this paper, we ask whether contagions can propagate through a population that is void of key players. We use Erdos-Renyi random graphs as a representation of unstructured populations that lack key players, and investigate whether complex contagions - those requiring reinforcement - can spread on them. We demonstrate that two game-theoretic contagion models that utilize common knowledge for collective action can readily spread such contagions, which is a significant difference from classic complex contagion models. We compare contagion dynamics results on unstructured networks to those on more typically-studied, structured social networks to understand the role of network structure. We test a total of 14 networks. The two common knowledge models are also contrasted to understand the effects of different modeling assumptions on dynamics. We show that under a wide range of conditions, these two models produce markedly different results.","PeriodicalId":225942,"journal":{"name":"2016 International Conference on Behavioral, Economic and Socio-cultural Computing (BESC)","volume":"372 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2016-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"2016 International Conference on Behavioral, Economic and Socio-cultural Computing (BESC)","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BESC.2016.7804473","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
Contagion models have been used to study the spread of social behavior among agents of a population, such as information diffusion, social influence, and participation to collective action (e.g., protests). Key players, which are typically high-degree, -k-core or -centrality agents in a networked population, are considered important for spreading social contagions. In this paper, we ask whether contagions can propagate through a population that is void of key players. We use Erdos-Renyi random graphs as a representation of unstructured populations that lack key players, and investigate whether complex contagions - those requiring reinforcement - can spread on them. We demonstrate that two game-theoretic contagion models that utilize common knowledge for collective action can readily spread such contagions, which is a significant difference from classic complex contagion models. We compare contagion dynamics results on unstructured networks to those on more typically-studied, structured social networks to understand the role of network structure. We test a total of 14 networks. The two common knowledge models are also contrasted to understand the effects of different modeling assumptions on dynamics. We show that under a wide range of conditions, these two models produce markedly different results.