The emergence of leadership in social networks

Abstract

We study a networked version of the minority game in which agents can choose to follow the choices made by a neighbouring agent in a social network. We show that for a wide variety of networks a leadership structure always emerges, with most agents following the choice made by a few agents. We find a suitable parameterisation which highlights the universal aspects of the behaviour and which also indicates where results depend on the type of social network.

Leadership in Mammalian Societies: Emergence, Distribution, Power, and Payoff

“…For example, in a version of the minority game [26,27] the choices of a small number of individuals with the best strategies (leaders) [27,28]. In a version of the Prisoner Dilemma game with dynamical adjustment of social ties and social learning, adaptation dynamics favor the emergence of highly connected cooperators with high payoffs [29].…”

Infants’ representation of asymmetric social influence

“…Fourth, we tested infants' understanding of social influence expressed by similarity in behaviors using situations in which the actions or goals of a target are repeatedly reproduced by other agents (Cartwright et al, 2013;Clemson & Evans, 2012). However, real-world scenarios are much more complex; followers do not always merely reproduce what influential agents do.…”

Determining leadership in contentious discussions

“…Lu [1] proposes the LeaderRank algorithm to identify leaders in social network by quantifying the user influence over network. Clemson [2] studies a network version of minority games to identify the followers in the network and in turn identify the leaders by determining the users who follows the smallest number of users. Fazeen [3] presents context dependent and independent models to identify leaders, lurkers, spammers and group associates in social networks.…”