Information Production and Link Formation in Social Computing Systems

Social computing provide a popular, cost-effective and scalable framework for building new engineering systems as well as improving the performance of numerous existing systems. However, the self-interest of agents of such systems generates intrinsic incentive problems. This work analyzes these incentive problems from several points of view. First, we analyze the trade-offs (of each individual agent) between the costs and benefits of producing information personally and forming links to collect information (from other agents), and the strategic implications of these trade-offs. A central point of the analysis is that information is assumed to be heterogeneous (rather than homogeneous as in previous analyses) and agents value this heterogeneity. The analysis has implications for the topology that emerges endogenously. For large populations, the implication is that the topology is necessarily of a core-periphery type: hub agents (at the core of the network) produce and share most of the information, while spoke agents (at the periphery of the network) derive most of their information from hub agents, producing little of it themselves. As the population becomes larger, the number of hub agents and the total amount of information produced grow in proportion to the total population. Our conclusions had been conjectured for many social computing systems but not been previously derived in any formal framework, and are in stark contradiction to the "law of the few" that had been established in previous work, under the assumption that information is homogeneous and part of the endowment of agents, rather than heterogeneous and produced.