Balancing the pain and gain of hobnobbing: Utility-based network building over attributed social networks

The establishment of interpersonal ties is a pivotal problem in the structural analysis of social networks. In particular, link recommend ation problem asks for valuable future links to establish by an individual. Existing methods for this problem rely on link predict ion that evaluates the likelihood of successful tie creation between two individuals. Such methods do not consider the social capital gained by agents, nor do they concern with the required cost of this process. In light of this linutation. we propose a utility-based network building problem, with an aim to strike a balance between the gained social capital - in the form of closeness centrality - and the cost of establishing ties. We propose algorithms to solve this problem over networks whose nodes may or may not be labelled with attributes, and test their performance on a range of synthes ized and real-world social networks. By having multiple agents adopting utility-based network building strategies, we propose a suite of models of network formation and demonstrate empirically that the they capture important structural properties. In particul ar, we investigate the emergence of a core/periphery structure as a joint result of preferential attachment and network building strategies.