Influence in a large society: Interplay between information dynamics and network structure
Name
Dolecek-2009-Influence in a large society Interplay between information dynamics and network structure.pdf
Size
394.38 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Dolecek, Lara
Shah, Devavrat
Date Issued
August 2009
Journal
IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, 2009. ISIT 2009.
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Citation
Dolecek, L., and D. Shah. “Influence in a large society: Interplay between information dynamics and network structure.” Information Theory, 2009. ISIT 2009. IEEE International Symposium on. 2009. 1574-1578. © 2009 IEEE
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Motivated by the recent emergence of large online social networks, we seek to understand the effects the underlying social network (graph) structure and the information dynamics have on the creation of influence of an individual. We examine a natural model for information dynamics under two important temporal scales: a first impression setting and a long- term or equilibrated setting. We obtain a characterization of relevant network structures under these temporal aspects, thereby allowing us to formalize the existence of influential agents. Specifically, we find that the existence of an influential agent corresponds to: (a) strictly positive information theoretic capacity over an infinite-sized noisy broadcast tree network in the first impression case, and (b) positive recurrent property of an appropriate (countable state space) Markov chain in the long-term case. As an application of our results, we evaluate the parameter space of the popular ldquosmall worldrdquo network model to identify when the network structure supports the existence of influential agents.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISIT.2009.5205820
