Accession Number:

ADA556549

Title:

Winner Takes All: Competing Viruses or Ideas on Fair-Play Networks

Descriptive Note:

Conference paper

Corporate Author:

CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIV PITTSBURGH PA DEPT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

Personal Author(s):

• Prakash, B. A.
• Beutel, Alex
• Rosenfeld, Roni
• Faloutsos, Christos

Report Date:

2012-01-01

Pagination or Media Count:

11.0

Abstract:

Given two competing products or memes, or viruses etc. spreading over a given network, can we predict what will happen at the end, that is, which product will win, in terms of highest market share One may naively expect that the better product stronger virus will just have a larger footprint proportional to the quality ratio of the products or strength ratio of the viruses. However, we prove the surprising result that, under realistic conditions, for any graph topology, the stronger virus completely wipes-out the weaker one, thus not merely winning but taking it all. In addition to the proofs, we also demonstrate our result with simulations over diverse, real graph topologies, including the social-contact graph of the city of Portland OR about 31 million edges and 1 million nodes and internet AS router graphs. Finally, we also provide real data about competing products from Google-Insights, like Facebook-Myspace, and we show again that they agree with our analysis.

Descriptors:

• *MATHEMATICAL MODELS
• COMPETITION
• NETWORKS
• SELECTION
• SYMPOSIA
• TOPOLOGY

Subject Categories:

• Operations Research

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE