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Updated: May 30, 2026

A System for Tracking the Dynamics of Social Preference Behavior in Small Rodents
Published on: November 21, 2019
Emergence of scale-free leadership structure in social recommender systems
Tao Zhou1, Matúš Medo, Giulio Cimini
1Web Sciences Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, People's Republic of China. zhutou@ustc.edu
Abstract:
The study of the organization of social networks is important for the understanding of opinion formation, rumor spreading, and the emergence of trends and fashion. This paper reports empirical analysis of networks extracted from four leading sites with social functionality (Delicious, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube) and shows that they all display a scale-free leadership structure. To reproduce this feature, we propose an adaptive network model driven by social recommending. Artificial agent-based simulations of this model highlight a "good get richer" mechanism where users with broad interests and good judgments are likely to become popular leaders for the others. Simulations also indicate that the studied social recommendation mechanism can gradually improve the user experience by adapting to tastes of its users. Finally we outline implications for real online resource-sharing systems.
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