A General Attribute Diffusion Mechanism on Social Networks

Abstract

Diffusion, such as a spread of energy in physics or information? in the society, is a common? phenomenon ?in ?physical, biological or social sciences. However, it ?is ?not trivial ?to ?analytically ?describe? such a common? phenomenon? when commodity? or information is spread through a social network, which is a scale-free, small-world and random network found in our daily life. This work proposed a mathematical? model to trace the change of a target attribute in a diffusion? mechanism. Such model is applied to a commodity ?sharing game that participants could donate their tokens to each other based ?on? a ?defined? ?network relationship. ?Computer ?experiments? are conducted to study ??the ?diffusion ?and? decay ??coefficients,? which? govern ?respectively? the ?flow directions? and? magnitude decreases towards the steady state. Numerical ?simulations show the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed model.