A Model of Homophily, Common Knowledge and Collective Action Through Facebook

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce homophily to a game-theoretic model of collective action (e.g., protests) on Facebook and study the effect of homophily in individuals' willingness to participate in collective action, i.e., their thresholds, on the emergence and spread of collective action. We use a real Facebook network and conduct computational experiments to study contagion dynamics (the size and the speed of diffusion) with respect to the level of homophily.