Cascading behavior of an extended Watts model on networks

Abstract

In this study, we propose an extended Watts model to examine the effect of initiators on information cascades. The extended Watts model assumes that nodes with connections to initiators have low adoption thresholds than other nodes, due to the significant influence of initiators. We develop a tree approximation to describe the active node fraction for the extended Watts model in random networks and derive the cascade condition for a global cascade to occur with a small fraction of initiators. By analyzing the active node fraction and the cascade window of the extended Watts model on the Erdős-Rényi random graph, we find that increasing the influence of initiators facilitates the possibility of global cascades, i.e., how many nodes eventually become active is significantly affected by the fraction of initiators and the threshold of nodes directly connected to initiators, which determine cascade dynamics at early stages.