Relationships and Trust Modeling in Twitter Using Game Theory: The Supply Chain Perspective

Abstract

Supply chain has been one of the most popular and efficient ways of exploring more benefits across businesses from the perspective of particular enterprise, with the objective of improving the long-term performance of individual companies. With the rapid development of social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., social media has become one of the most valuable businesses due to largest user coverage, widest influential dissemination and highest commercial value. From the perspective of enterprises, leveraging social media for e-commerce are gradually being taken seriously. Indeed, social media helps compress the supply chain by eliminating unnecessary intermediate links. In this paper, we consider the roles in Twitter users (i.e., brands and audiences) as the nodes in supply chain, and simulate the social interactions between them as the collaboration decisions among supply chain members. Specifically, we consider social interactions as transactions, and sentiments as trust information. In this way, we tailor the traditional game model for modeling relationships among supply chain members in the context of Twitter, and propose a long-term game model based on trust.