Modeling the Dynamics of Social Networks

Modeling human dynamics responsible for the formation and evolution of the so-called social networks – structures comprised of individuals or organizations and indicating connectivities existing in a community – is a topic recently attracting a significant research interest. It has been claimed that these dynamics are scale-free in many practically important cases, such as impersonal and personal communication, auctioning in a market, accessing sites on the WWW, etc., and that human response times thus conform to the power law. While a certain amount of progress has recently been achieved in predicting the general response rate of a human population, existing formal theories of human behavior can hardly be found satisfactory to accommodate and comprehensively explain the scaling observed in social networks. In the presented study, a novel system-theoretic modeling approach is proposed and successfully applied to determine important characteristics of a communication network and to analyze consumer behavior on the WWW.