2023/12/21 by Naina Balepur, Andy Lee, Balepur, Naina +3
Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.14293
openalex publication_date 2023/12/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper we address how complex social communities emerge from local decisions by individuals with limited attention and knowledge. This problem is critical; if we understand community formation mechanisms, it may be possible to intervene to improve social welfare. We propose an interpretable, novel model for attributed community formation driven by resource-bounded individuals' strategic, selfish behavior. In our stylized model, attributed individuals act strategically in two dimensions: attribute and network structure. Agents are endowed with limited attention, and communication costs limit the number of active connections. In each time step, each agent proposes a new friendship. Agents then accept proposals, decline proposals, or remove friends, consistent with their strategy to maximize payoff. We identify criteria (number of stable triads) for convergence to some community structure and prove that our community formation model converges to a stable network. Ablations justify the ecological validity of our model and show that each aspect of the model is essential. Our empirical results on a physical world microfinance community demonstrate excellent model fits compared to baseline models.