ABSTRACT

However, these studies did not explicitly incorporate social structure in examining behavior diffusion. Pastor-Satorras and Vespignani [3] modeled the network as random, adopted mean field theory to investigate the epidemic spreading in a scale-free network and found the absence of an epidemic threshold and its associated critical behavior. More recently, how a behavior spreads in a network of interaction agents was studied in Ref. [4], in which agents’ actions are determined by the actions of their neighbors, according to a simple diffusion rule. In comparison [3], more general results were obtained, indicating that a threshold exists for the rate above which the behavior spreads and becomes persistent in the population. is threshold crucially depends on the connectivity distribution of the social network and on specific features of the diffusion rule.