Competition between Homophily and Information Entropy Maximization in Social Networks

In social networks, it is conventionally thought that two individuals with more overlapped friends tend to establish a new friendship, which could be stated as homophily breeding new connections. While the recent hypothesis of maximum information entropy is presented as the possible origin of effective navigation in small-world networks. We find there exists a competition between information entropy maximization and homophily in local structure through both theoretical and experimental analysis. This competition suggests that a newly built relationship between two individuals with more common friends would lead to less information entropy gain for them. We demonstrate that in the evolution of the social network, both of the two assumptions coexist. The rule of maximum information entropy produces weak ties in the network, while the law of homophily makes the network highly clustered locally and the individuals would obtain strong and trust ties. A toy model is also presented to demonstrate the competition and evaluate the roles of different rules in the evolution of real networks. Our findings could shed light on the social network modeling from a new perspective.