Abstract
Elites are subgroups of individuals within a society that have the ability and means to influence, lead, govern, and shape societies. Members of elites are often well connected individuals, which enables them to impose their influence to many and to quickly gather, process, and spread information. Here we argue that elites are not only composed of highly connected individuals, but also of intermediaries connecting hubs to form a cohesive and structured elite-subgroup at the core of a social network. For this purpose we present a generalization of the -core algorithm that allows to identify a social core that is composed of well-connected hubs together with their ‘connectors’. We show the validity of the idea in the framework of a virtual world defined by a massive multiplayer online game, on which we have complete information of various social networks. Exploiting this multiplex structure, we find that the hubs of the generalised -core identify those individuals that are high social performers in terms of a series of indicators that are available in the game. In addition, using a combined strategy which involves the generalised -core and the recently introduced -core, the elites of the different ’nations’ present in the game are perfectly identified as modules of the generalised -core. Interesting sudden shifts in the composition of the elite cores are observed at deep levels. We show that elite detection with the traditional -core is not possible in a reliable way. The proposed method might be useful in a series of more general applications, such as community detection.
Highlights
Almost universally, across cultures and times, societies are structured in a way that a small group of individuals are in the possession of the means to influence, shape, structure, lead, and govern large proportions of entire societies
To identify the elite cores, we suggest an algorithm that is similar in spirit to the traditional K-core, but that leads to entirely different compositions of the resulting core, which we called the generalised K-core
As a test system we used the human society of players of the Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) Pardus, which provides the networks of various social interactions [7, 23,24,25,26,27], and contains quantitative information of how individual players perform socially within the society in terms of leadership, wealth, social status among other skills, in which elite members are expected to score exceptionally high
Summary
Across cultures and times, societies are structured in a way that a small group of individuals are in the possession of the means to influence, shape, structure, lead, and govern large proportions of entire societies. In any case elites can not be defined per se, but only within the context of a social system, which are superpositions of various timevarying social networks, so-called multiplex networks (MPN) [6,7,8] These networks represent interactions between individuals as links of different types such as communication, trading, friendship, aggression, etc., see Fig. 1a. One would generally expect that members of elites are characterized by a large connectivity [9] in the various networks of the MPN, which enables them to doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0112606.g001
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