Competition ability dependence on uniqueness in some collaboration-competition bipartite networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how competition ability depends on uniqueness in collaboration-competition bipartite networks, extending previous models and analyzing empirical data from 15 real-world systems, revealing a generally shifted power law relationship.

Contribution

It extends the analysis of competition ability dependence on uniqueness to all cooperation-competition bipartite networks and provides empirical evidence from diverse real-world systems.

Findings

Dependence generally follows a shifted power law.

Empirical heterogeneity indexes of distributions are presented.

Most systems show a near power law dependence.

Abstract

Recently, our group quantitatively defined two quantities, "competition ability" and "uniqueness" (Chin. Phys. Lett. 26 (2009) 058901) for a kind of cooperation-competition bipartite networks, where "producers" produce some "products" and "output" them to a "market" to make competition. Factories, universities or restaurants can serve as the examples. In the letter we presented an analytical conclusion that the competition ability was linearly dependent on the uniqueness in the trivial cases, where both the "input quality" and "competition gain" obey normal distributions. The competition between Chinese regional universities was taken as examples. In this article we discuss the abnormal cases where competition gains show the distributions near to power laws. In addition, we extend the study onto all the cooperation-competition bipartite networks and therefore redefine the competition ability. The empirical investigation of the competition ability dependence on the uniqueness in 15 real world collaboration-competition systems is presented, 14 of which belong to the general nontrivial cases. We find that the dependence generally follows the so-called "shifted power law (SPL)", but very near to power laws. The empirically obtained heterogeneity indexes of the distributions of competition ability and uniqueness are also presented. These empirical investigations will be used as a supplementary of a future paper, which will present the comparison and further discussions about the competition ability dependence on the uniqueness in the abnormal collaboration-competition systems and the relationship between the dependence and the competition ability and uniqueness heterogeneity.