Emergence of a Small World from Local Interactions: Modeling Acquaintance Networks

2001/08/20 by Joern Davidsen, Jörn Davidsen, Holger Ebel +1 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.stat-mech

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.88.128701

published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 88 (2002) 128701 · 4 pages RevTeX, 2 figures PostScript

arxiv created 2001/08/20 · openalex publication_date 2002/03/08 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30

Abstract

How do we make acquaintances? A simple observation from everyday experience is that often one of our acquaintances introduces us to one of his or her acquaintances. Such a simple triangle interaction may be viewed as the basis of the evolution of many social networks. Here, it is demonstrated that this assumption is sufficient to reproduce major nontrivial features of social networks: short path length, high clustering, and scale-free or exponential link distributions.

Citations

• Error and attack tolerance of complex networks

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