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Popularity and Similarity Among Friends: An Agent-Based Model for Friendship Development

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Proceedings of the European Conference on Complex Systems 2012

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Complexity ((SPCOM))

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Abstract

This work investigates how local preferences, social structural constraints and randomness might affect the development of the friendship network in Facebook. We do this by analyzing a snapshot Facebook dataset of Princeton University’s students, and by building an agent-based simulation for comparison. Several different, but plausible, processes of friendship network development are proposed in which the structural information of the growing network and the student preferences are taken into account and then compared with the data. ‘Network formation based on personal preference and social structure with some randomness’ matches the data best, and is thus the preferred hypothesis for the way that students add “friends” on Facebook.

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Acknowledgements

We would thank our colleagues at the Centre for Policy Modelling for their helpful comments and feedback. We also would like to thank Mason Porter of Oxford University, who shared the underlying dataset with us.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Policy Modelling, Manchester Metropolitan University Business School, Manchester, UK

    Sma Abbas

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  1. Sma Abbas
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Correspondence to Sma Abbas .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Université Libre de Bruxelles Faculté des Sciences, Brussels, Belgium

    Thomas Gilbert

  2. University of Warwick Mathematics Institute, Coventry, United Kingdom

    Markus Kirkilionis

  3. Université Libre de Bruxelles Faculté des Sciences, Brussels, Belgium

    Gregoire Nicolis

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Abbas, S. (2013). Popularity and Similarity Among Friends: An Agent-Based Model for Friendship Development. In: Gilbert, T., Kirkilionis, M., Nicolis, G. (eds) Proceedings of the European Conference on Complex Systems 2012. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00395-5_77

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