Macro- and micro-structure of trust networks
Abstract
A challenging problem in the social sciences is the characterization of the formation of ``social capital''. It is believed that societies with more social capital are more democratic and economically developed than societies with little social capital. However, social capital is a concept hard to quantify and measure in a ``real-word'' context. Here, we take advantage of an existing "web of trust'' between users of the "Pretty-Good-Privacy" (PGP) encryption algorithm, which is used in digital communication to ``sign'' documents so that the recipient knows for sure who the author is. Our analysis reveals the coexistence in the web of trust of a macro scale-free structure with micro strongly-connected cells in a complex network. We also show that when this network is intentionally attacked the scale-free structure rapidly disintegrates and that the resulting network is partitioned into a large number of small strongly-connected cells that are resilient to the intentional attack.
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0206240,
title = {Macro- and micro-structure of trust networks},
author = {X. Guardiola and R. Guimera and A. Arenas and A. Diaz-Guilera and D. Streib and L. A. N. Amaral},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0206240},
year = {2007}
}