Competition-induced criticality in a model of meme popularity

TL;DR

This paper presents a model explaining heavy-tailed meme popularity distributions as a result of competition for user attention, positioning the system at criticality with power-law behaviors similar to real data.

Contribution

It introduces a competition-based model that naturally leads to criticality and heavy-tailed popularity distributions, differing from previous preferential-attachment models.

Findings

Popularity follows a power-law distribution with exponent less than 2.

Competition induces criticality in meme diffusion.

Model aligns with empirical heavy-tailed data.

Abstract

Heavy-tailed distributions of meme popularity occur naturally in a model of meme diffusion on social networks. Competition between multiple memes for the limited resource of user attention is identified as the mechanism that poises the system at criticality. The popularity growth of each meme is described by a critical branching process, and asymptotic analysis predicts power-law distributions of popularity with very heavy tails (exponent $\alpha<2$, unlike preferential-attachment models), similar to those seen in empirical data.