The Competition of User Attentions Among Social Network Services: A Social Evolutionary Game Approach

Abstract

As the total amount of users in the social network services approach the total amount of netizens, social network service providers have to compete with each other for the attention of the existing users, rather than attracting totally new users without any social network service using experiences. Most of the current game theoretical studies on social network services focus on the evolution of the cooperation/defection between users, and the evolution of the structure of the networks for a single social networks, and fail to consider the competition of multiple social networks over a same and stable users group and their user attentions. In this paper, we propose a competitive social evolutionary game model to describe the competition of user attentions among social network services. We introduce the concept of user attention, and the popularity of social networks to describe the local and general user attention distributions, respectively. Our simulation of the competition between two social networks with different initial network structures and cooperation/defection utilities shows that a greater reputation awareness can suppress the influence of the defect temptation value.