Title
Modeling User Reputation In Online Social Networks: The Role Of Costs, Benefits, And Reciprocity
Abstract
We analyze an agent-based model to estimate how the costs and benefits of users in an online social network (OSN) impact the robustness of the OSN. Benefits are measured in terms of relative reputation that users receive from their followers. They can be increased by direct and indirect reciprocity in following each other, which leads to a core-periphery structure of the OSN. Costs relate to the effort to login, to maintain the profile, etc. and are assumed as constant for all users. The robustness of the OSN depends on the entry and exit of users over time. Intuitively, one would expect that higher costs lead to more users leaving and hence to a less robust OSN. We demonstrate that an optimal cost level exists, which maximizes both the performance of the OSN, measured by means of the long-term average benefit of its users, and the robustness of the OSN, measured by means of the lifetime of the core of the OSN. Our mathematical and computational analyses unfold how changes in the cost level impact reciprocity and subsequently the core-periphery structure of the OSN, to explain the optimal cost level.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.3390/e22101073
ENTROPY
Keywords
DocType
Volume
reciprocity, core-periphery network, cost-benefit relation, robustness, reputation
Journal
22
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
10
1099-4300
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Schweitzer Frank100.34
Pavlin Mavrodiev2775.18
Seufert Adrian M.300.34
Garcia David400.34