Structural Effects and Aggregation in a Social-Network Model of Natural Resource Consumption

Abstract

In this paper we consider a networked system of natural-resource consumption, where the agents are governed by a recently reported model of consumer psychology Dynamics of the consumption for each agent are influenced by the state of the resource and consumption of her neighbors. The process is parameterized by the psychological characteristics of each agent. This study extends the original model to incorporate the underlying network topology and explores the effects of aggregation via densely-connected communities present in the network. The exercise yields new interpretations of the predictions made by the original model in context of the influence network. We present aggregation mechanisms first for certain canonical structures of the consuming population and later on for a class of non-canonically structured populations. In the end we present an approximate aggregation scheme for populations where only some inaccurate information of the consumer characteristics is available.