Related papers: 'Binge' drinking in the UK: a social network pheno…

We study mixing patterns in networks, meaning the propensity for nodes of different kinds to connect to one another. The phenomenon of assortative mixing, whereby nodes prefer to connect to others that are similar to themselves, has been…

In human societies, people's willingness to compete and strive for better social status as well as being envious of those perceived in some way superior lead to social structures that are intrinsically hierarchical. Here we propose an…

This paper aims to shed some light on the concept of virality - especially in social networks - and to provide new insights on its structure. We argue that: (a) virality is a phenomenon strictly connected to the nature of the content being…

Modifiable health behaviors, a leading cause of illness and death in many countries, are often driven by individual beliefs and sentiments about health and disease. Individual behaviors affecting health outcomes are increasingly modulated…

This paper presents an experimental study to investigate the learning and decision making behavior of individuals in a human society. Social learning is used as the mathematical basis for modelling interaction of individuals that aim to…

Complex networks as the World Wide Web, the web of human sexual contacts or criminal networks often do not have an engineered architecture but instead are self-organized by the actions of a large number of individuals. From these local…

In recent years, social media has become a ubiquitous and integral part of social networking. One of the major attentions made by social researchers is the tendency of like-minded people to interact with one another in social groups, a…

A prominent threat to causal inference about peer effects over social networks is the presence of homophily bias, that is, social influence between friends and families is entangled with common characteristics or underlying similarities…

In this work we study a simple contagion model for drinking behavior evolution, but including the presence of inflexible or zealot agents, i.e., individuals that never change their behavior (never drink or always drink a lot). We analyze…

In this paper we show that the small world and weak ties phenomena can spontaneously emerge in a social network of interacting agents. This dynamics is simulated in the framework of a simplified model of opinion diffusion in an evolving…

We study how the diffusion of broadband Internet affects social capital using two data sets from the UK. Our empirical strategy exploits the fact that broadband access has long depended on customers' position in the voice telecommunication…

We propose a growing network model for a community with a group structure. The community consists of individual members and groups, gatherings of members. The community grows as a new member is introduced by an existing member at each time…

What drives the propensity for the social network dynamics? Social influence is believed to drive both off-line and on-line human behavior, however it has not been considered as a driver of social network evolution. Our analysis suggest…

Social trends or fashions are spontaneous collective decisions made by large portions of a community, often without an apparent good reason. The spontaneous formation of trends provides a well documented mechanism for the spread of…

With the rise of social media as an important channel for the debate and discussion of public affairs, online social networks such as Twitter have become important platforms for public information and engagement by policy makers. To…

A dynamic memory model is proposed in which an agent ``learns'' a new agent by means of recommendation. The agents can also ``remember'' and ``forget''. The memory size is decreased while the population size is kept constant. ``Fame''…

Social influence drives both offline and online human behaviour. It pervades cultural markets, and manifests itself in the adoption of scientific and technical innovations as well as the spread of social practices. Prior empirical work on…

Users increasing activity across various social networks made it the most widely used platform for exchanging and propagating information among individuals. To spread information within a network, a user initially shared information on a…

In a large social network whose members harbor binary sentiments towards an issue, we investigate the asymptotic accuracy of sentiment detection. We model the user sentiments by an Ising Markov random field model and allow the user…

The search engine is tightly coupled with social networks and is primarily designed for users to acquire interested information. Specifically, the search engine assists the information dissemination for social networks, i.e., enabling users…