The co-evolution of brand effect and competitiveness in evolving networks

Abstract

The principle that 'the brand effect is attractive' underlies preferential attachment. Here we show that the brand effect is just one dimension of attractiveness. Another dimension is competitiveness. We firstly develop a general framework that allows us to investigate the competitive aspect of real networks, instead of simply preferring popular nodes. Our model accurately describes the evolution of social and technological networks. The phenomenon which more competitive nodes become richer links can help us to understand the evolution of many competitive systems in nature and society. In general, the paper provides an explicit analytical expression of degree distributions of the network. In particular, the model yields a nontrivial time evolution of nodes' properties and scale-free behavior with exponents depending on the microscopic parameters characterizing the competition rules. Secondly, through theoretical analysis and numerical simulations, it reveals that our model has not only the universality for the homogeneous weighted network, but also the character for the heterogeneous weighted network. Thirdly, the paper also develops a model based on a profit-driven mechanism. It can better describe the observed phenomenon in enterprise cooperation networks. We show that standard preferential attachment, the growing random graph, the initial attractiveness model, the fitness model and weighted networks, can all be seen as degenerate cases of our model.