Trust Exploitation and Attention Competition: A Game Theoretical Model
This work addresses the issue of malicious activities in social networks for platform designers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing game-theoretic approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of malicious information dissemination in social network sites by modeling the strategic behavior of malicious hosts balancing social trust and malicious gains, resulting in optimal response strategies and a system maneuver mechanism verified through numerical studies.
The proliferation of Social Network Sites (SNSs) has greatly reformed the way of information dissemination, but also provided a new venue for hosts with impure motivations to disseminate malicious information. Social trust is the basis for information dissemination in SNSs. Malicious hosts judiciously and dynamically make the balance between maintaining its social trust and selfishly maximizing its malicious gain over a long time-span. Studying the optimal response strategies for each malicious host could assist to design the best system maneuver so as to achieve the targeted level of overall malicious activities. In this paper, we propose an interaction-based social trust model, and formulate the maximization of long-term malicious gains of multiple competing hosts as a non-cooperative differential game. Through rigorous analysis, optimal response strategies are identified and the best system maneuver mechanism is presented. Extensive numerical studies further verify the analytical results.