Evolutionary analysis on online social networks using a social evolutionary game

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a social evolutionary game to investigate the evolution of social networks. Through comparison between simulation and empirical analysis on the social networks of Twitter and Sina Weibo, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed model and estimate the evolutionary phases of the two networks. We find that the users of Sina Weibo can withstand comparatively more costs than the users of Twitter. Therefore, they can perform more positive behavior and consider more about their reputation than Twitter users. Moreover, the evolutionary time of Sina Weibo to a stable state is longer than that of Twitter.