Competition-induced criticality in a model of meme popularity

2013/05/31 by James P. Gleeson, Jonathan A. Ward, Kevin P. O'Sullivan +1 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · Computer Science · #physics.soc-ph #cs.SI #nlin.AO

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.112.048701

published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 048701 (2014) · This version accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters. 6 pages main text, 12 pages Supplementary Material

arxiv created 2014/01/21 · arxiv updated 2014/07/30

Abstract

Heavy-tailed distributions of meme popularity occur naturally in a model of meme diffusion on social networks. Competition between multiple memes for the limited resource of user attention is identified as the mechanism that poises the system at criticality. The popularity growth of each meme is described by a critical branching process, and asymptotic analysis predicts power-law distributions of popularity with very heavy tails (exponent α<2, unlike preferential-attachment models), similar to those seen in empirical data.

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