Lurking is a complex user-behavioral phenomenon that occurs in alllarge-scale online communities and social networks. It generally refers to thebehavior characterizing users that benefit from the information produced byothers in the community without actively contributing back to the production ofsocial content. The amount and evolution of lurkers may strongly affect anonline social environment, therefore understanding the lurking dynamics andidentifying strategies to curb this trend are relevant problems. In thisregard, we introduce the Lurker Game, i.e., a model for analyzing thetransitions from a lurking to a non-lurking (i.e., active) user role, and viceversa, in terms of evolutionary game theory. We evaluate the proposed LurkerGame by arranging agents on complex networks and analyzing the systemevolution, seeking relations between the network topology and the finalequilibrium of the game. Results suggest that the Lurker Game is suitable tomodel the lurking dynamics, showing how the adoption of rewarding mechanismscombined with the modeling of hypothetical heterogeneity of users' interestsmay lead users in an online community towards a cooperative behavior.
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