Information dissemination groups, especially those disseminating the same kind of information such as advertising, product promotion, etc., compete with each other when their information spread on social networks. Most of the existing methods analyze the dissemination mechanism mainly upon the information itself without considering human characteristics, e.g. relation networks, cooperation/defection, etc. In this paper, we introduce a framework of social evolutionary game (SEG) to investigate the influence of human behaviors in competitive information dissemination. Coordination game is applied to represent human behaviors in the competition of asynchronous information diffusion. We perform a series of simulations through a specific game model to analyze the mechanism and factors of information diffusion, and show that when the benefits of competitive information is around 1.2 times of the original one, it can compensate the loss of reputation caused by the change of strategy. Furthermore, through experiments on a dataset of two films on Sina Weibo, we described the mechanism of competition evolution over real data of social network, and validated the effectiveness of our model.
Evolutionary Game Analysis of Competitive Information Dissemination on Social Networks: An Agent-Based Computational Approach