The Emergence of Leadership in Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how leadership structures naturally form in social networks through a minority game model, revealing universal patterns and network-dependent behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a networked minority game model demonstrating the emergence of leadership hierarchies across various social network structures.

Findings

Leadership structures consistently emerge in diverse networks.

Most agents tend to follow a few influential leaders.

Universal behavior patterns are identified across different network types.

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.