Emergence of scaling and assortative mixing through altruism

Many social networks, apart from displaying scale-free characteristics observed in some instances, possess another remarkable feature that distinguishes them from those that appear in biological and technological context—assortativity. However, little or no attention has been payed to the mechanism of assortativity in modeling these networks. Inspired by individuals’ altruistic behavior in sociology, we develop a model with a different growth mechanism called “altruistic attachment”, which can reproduce not only the power law degree distribution but degree correlations. We study in detail the statistical properties of our network model, which we also demonstrate striking differences with the BA model, and can portray real social networks more precisely.