A game-theoretic model of attention in social networks

  • Authors:

  • Ashish Goel;Farnaz Ronaghi

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Department of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

  • Venue:
  • WAW'12 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Algorithms and Models for the Web Graph
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

We model the economics of producing content in online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. We propose a game-theoretic model within which we quantify inefficiencies from contributions by strategic users in online environments. Attention and information are assumed to be the main motivation for user contributions. We treat attention as a mechanism for sharing the profit from consuming information and introduce a general framework for analyzing dynamics of contributions in online environments. We analyze the proposed model and identify conditions for existence and efficient computation of pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. We prove a bicriteria bound on the price of anarchy; in particular we show that the social welfare from central control over level of contribution by users is no larger than the social welfare from strategic agents with twice as large consumption utilities. We then construct and analyze a family of production games that have an arbitrarily large price of anarchy. We also prove non-robustness of the price of anarchy for a particular instance of the introduced family, establishing a distinction between the games studied here and network congestion games.