Interacting discovery processes on complex networks

Abstract

Innovation is the driving force of human progress. Recent urn models reproduce well the dynamics through which the discovery of a novelty may trigger further ones, in an expanding space of opportunities, but neglect the effects of social interactions. Here we focus on the mechanisms of collective exploration and we propose a model in which many urns, representing different explorers, are coupled through the links of a social network and exploit opportunities coming from their contacts. We study different network structures showing, both analytically and numerically, that the pace of discovery of an explorer depends on its centrality in the social network. Our model sheds light on the role that social structures play in discovery processes.

22 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, Supplemental Material

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Geography of Science: Competitiveness and Inequality
• Interacting Innovation processes: case studies from Reddit and Gutenberg
• On the dual nature of adoption processes in complex networks
• Time-Dependent Urn Models reproduce the full spectrum of novelties discovery
• Nodal statistics-based equivalence relation for graph collections
• Central limit theorems for interacting innovation processes, related statistical tools and general results