Trust Exploitation and Attention Competition: A Game Theoretical Model

TL;DR

This paper models how malicious hosts in social networks strategically balance trust and malicious gains over time, using game theory to identify optimal response strategies and system mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces a differential game model for malicious hosts in SNSs, providing analytical solutions for optimal malicious strategies and system control mechanisms.

Findings

Optimal malicious response strategies are derived.

System maneuver mechanisms to control malicious activities are proposed.

Analytical results are verified through numerical simulations.

Abstract

The proliferation of Social Network Sites (SNSs) has greatly reformed the way of information dissemination, but also provided a new venue for hosts with impure motivations to disseminate malicious information. Social trust is the basis for information dissemination in SNSs. Malicious hosts judiciously and dynamically make the balance between maintaining its social trust and selfishly maximizing its malicious gain over a long time-span. Studying the optimal response strategies for each malicious host could assist to design the best system maneuver so as to achieve the targeted level of overall malicious activities. In this paper, we propose an interaction-based social trust model, and formulate the maximization of long-term malicious gains of multiple competing hosts as a non-cooperative differential game. Through rigorous analysis, optimal response strategies are identified and the best system maneuver mechanism is presented. Extensive numerical studies further verify the analytical results.