Stable Community Structures and Social Exclusion

TL;DR

This paper uses game theory to analyze social exclusion in networks, revealing that stable community structures often involve socially excluded agents, indicating exclusion may be a common outcome.

Contribution

It demonstrates that all stable community structures in the studied class inherently include socially excluded agents, highlighting a fundamental aspect of social network stability.

Findings

Stable community structures often include socially excluded agents.

Social exclusion may be the typical outcome in stable social networks.

Exclusion is not an anomaly but a norm in network stability.

Abstract

In this paper we study social exclusion in social (information) networks using a game-theoretic approach, and study the stability of a certain class community structures that are a Nash equilibrium. The main result of our analysis shows that all stable community structures (Nash equilibria) in this class are community structures under which some agents are socially excluded, and do not belong to any of the communities. This result is quite striking as it suggests that social exclusion might be the "norm" (an expected outcome) in social networks, rather than an anomaly.