Social influence in small—world networks

Abstract

We report on our numerical studies of the Axelrod model for social influence in small-world networks.Our simulation results show that the topology of the network has a crucial effect on the evolution of cultures .As the randomness of the network increases,the system undergoes a transition from a highly fragmented phase to a uniform phase.we also find that the power-law distribution at the transition point,reported by castellano et al,is not a critical phenomenon;it exists not only at the onset of transition but also for almost any control parameters,All these power-law distributions are stable against pertubations.A mean-field theory is developed to explain these phenomena.