Smart Evolution for Information Diffusion Over Social Networks

In social network, the existence of malicious users can create lots of detrimental consequences. To diminish their negative influences, it is necessary for rational users to identify and interact with each neighbor carefully to protect themselves from malicious ones. Therefore, it is crucial to establish a rule for users' interaction in order to mitigate malicious users' influences. In this paper, we propose a smart evolution model based on evolutionary game theory by introducing the reputation mechanism. The model takes into account both current reputation and instant incentives during users' decision-making process. On the basis of whether users share reputation values with others, we introduce schemes without reciprocity principle and with the indirect reciprocity principle respectively. With the social norm and reputation updating policy, we theoretically analyze the evolutionary dynamics and corresponding ESSs by explicitly considering the effects of malicious users. Finally, simulations based on synthetic networks and real-world data are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed smart evolution model.