Why Do People Use Social Media? Agent-Based Simulation and Population Dynamics Analysis of the Evolution of Cooperation in Social Media

摘要

Why do people use social media, even though they must pay certain costs for generating content? The purpose of this study is to answer a more pointed question: What type of mechanism can encourage the continuous participation of users in social media? To address this question, we clarify various conditions that must be met to motivate users to voluntarily provide information in social media. In this work, we use the framework of ``the public goods game'' to describe user behaviors such as posting articles and comments. We first describe the communication carried out in specific social media by extending the metanorms game, which issues both rewards for cooperation and punishments for non-cooperation. We further develop a simulation model to clarify the conditions needed to create a cooperation-dominant environment, which we define as a world where nearly everyone cooperates in the sense used in game theory. From the results of our agent-based simulation, it is clear that the rewards for cooperation and the rewards for rewards given by others can work to encourage cooperation. Furthermore, we analyze the relationships between the costs and benefits of cooperation by using dynamics analysis. Consequently, we clarify that cooperative behaviors are dominant when the benefits of cooperation are larger than the costs of rewarding other users.