Training Opinion Leaders in Microblog: A Game Theory Approach

Abstract

There is no doubt that microblog is becoming one of the most forceful powers over the Internet, with billions of users all over the world. Making use of the well-connected microblog network, a highly influential user (or opinion leader) can be of great importance, with commercial, social, or even political values. In this paper, we discuss the conditions and methods to become an opinion leader based on game theory. First, the standards of a leader are to be discussed. We then present a set of parameters to describe the intrinsic features of a user, and build a game theory model to simulate the evolution of microblog network and the spread or shrinkage of the user influence. The simulation results shows that players with high quality messages are the fountainhead of the majority of opinion leaders. Among the leaders, an one-person microblog account better follows someone with a rate applying uniform distribution, while a robot or multi-person account becomes a team leader by following someone with a rate applying poisson distribution.