Eur. Phys. J. B (2013) 86: 478
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2013-40328-4

Regular Article

Effect of the social influence on topological properties of user-object bipartite networks

Research Center of Complex Systems Science, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai 200093, P.R. China

^a e-mail: liujg004@gmail.com

Received: 9 April 2013
Received in final form: 18 July 2013
Published online: 20 November 2013

Abstract

Social influence plays an important role in analyzing online users’ collective behaviors [Salganik et al., Science 311, 854 (2006)]. However, the effect of the social influence from the viewpoint of theoretical model is missing. In this paper, by taking into account the social influence and users’ preferences, we develop a theoretical model to analyze the topological properties of user-object bipartite networks, including the degree distribution, average nearest neighbor degree and the bipartite clustering coefficient, as well as topological properties of the original user-object networks and their unipartite projections. According to the users’ preferences and the global ranking effect, we analyze the theoretical results for two benchmark data sets, Amazon and Bookcrossing, which are approximately consistent with the empirical results. This work suggests that this model is feasible to analyze topological properties of bipartite networks in terms of the social influence and the users’ preferences.