Stable and Efficient Structures for the Content Production and Consumption in Information Communities

TL;DR

This paper models information communities to identify structures that maximize stability and efficiency in content production and consumption, revealing a small core of celebrity producers as optimal.

Contribution

It introduces a mathematical model analyzing community structures, demonstrating that a small core of celebrity producers yields optimal stability and efficiency.

Findings

Small core of celebrity producers is optimal for stability.

Model explains sociological observations like 'the Law of the Few'.

Insights into building effective information communities.

Abstract

Real-world information communities exhibit inherent structures that characterize a system that is stable and efficient for content production and consumption. In this paper, we study such structures through mathematical modelling and analysis. We formulate a generic model of a community in which each member decides how they allocate their time between content production and consumption with the objective of maximizing their individual reward. We define the community system as "stable and efficient" when a Nash equilibrium is reached while the social welfare of the community is maximized. We investigate the conditions for forming a stable and efficient community under two variations of the model representing different internal relational structures of the community. Our analysis results show that the structure with "a small core of celebrity producers" is the optimally stable and efficient for a community. These analysis results provide possible explanations to the sociological observations such as "the Law of the Few" and also provide insights into how to effectively build and maintain the structure of information communities.