Graphical Evolutionary Game Theoretic Analysis of Super Users in Information Diffusion

Abstract

In social networks, to better understand the avalanche of information flow over networks and to investigate its impact on economy and our social life, it is of crucial importance to model and analyze the information diffusion process. To address the existence of "super users" in social networks who have higher social status and potentially larger influence, we propose a graphical evolutionary game theoretic framework to investigate the impact of such super users and their strategy update rules on information propagation. We analyze the evolutionary dynamics and the stable states. Simulation results are consistent with our theoretical analysis, and demonstrate that strategy update rule is the critical factor that influences the stable states of the information diffusion process.