As content that users access on their mobile devices becomes bulkier, opportunistic networking is becoming a potential complement to centralised and infrastructure based downloads. We study how users share items of mutual interest with each other with a simple model based on a ‘networked urn process’. We investigate the effect of different content sharing policies upon a multi-category set of items. We find that the process of sharing mutual interests inherently disproportionately reinforces category replication disparity, i.e., the most popular categories become proportionally even more numerous. These findings uncover a major hurdle in the creation of automatic opportunistic file sharing between users. Even if users altruistically sacrifice battery power and network resources to share content not relevant to them, overall, the system may not be able to fairly distribute items that belong to niche categories.
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