This paper describes an agent-based computational model for studying the formation and evolution of trade networks in decentralized market economies. A virtual economic world is constructed , populated by heterogeneous endogenously interacting traders with internalized data and modes of behavior. This virtual world can be used to study the formation and evolution of trade networks under alterna...

Today, social networks have become an unseparable part of human society and because the facilities they provide to users, are very popular used every day. Social media, through online tools, group critical thought, team-centered project-based learning, problem-solving, their power lies not only in producing sharing knowledge among its members, but also reflecting new knowledge. The use virtual ...

Copyright © 2000, Idea Group Publishing. Robert Putnam (1993) has developed a theory of social capital to explain the effect of decreasing community participation and civic engagement on declining institutional performance. Subsequently, there has been much speculation as to whether emerging virtual communities can counteract this trend. We apply the findings of computer-mediated communication ...

Evidence suggests that people often waver to buy from online vendors because of uncertainty about vendor behavior or the risk of having wrong information about the products. Trust plays a central role in helping consumers overcome perceptions of risk. Moreover, thematic groups are gaining a lot of attention and high centrality in online community, as users share opinions and/or mutually collabo...

Online Social Networking Sites (SNS) enable collaborative information sharing and help build resilient communities in areas exposed to risk. This paper reviews existing research on community vulnerability and resilience, and explores the role of communication in fostering strong community networks. The paper draws upon examples of SNS used to share information and explores how such technology m...

For many networked games, such as the Defense of the Ancients and StarCraft series, the unofficial leagues created by players themselves greatly enhance user-experience, and extend the success of each game. Understanding the social structure that players of these games implicitly form helps to create innovative gaming services to the benefit of both players and game operators. But how to extrac...

Social networks play an important role in Web 2.0. For many users establishing contacts and staying in touch in the virtual world is more than just a spare time filler. In social networks like Facebook they provide much information about themselves in user profiles. Also for online dating the focus is on establishing new contacts. In general, three types of dating sites can be distinguished: mo...

Recently, social networks provide some rich resources of heterogeneous data which their analysis can lead to discover unknown information and relations within such networks. Users in online social networks tend to form community groups based on common location, interests, occupation, etc. Hence, communities play special roles in the structure–function relationship. Therefore, detecting signific...

This paper presents a hybrid approach to identify coordinated spam or malware attacks carried out using sybil accounts on online social networks. It also presents an online social network data collection methodology, with a special focus on Facebook social network. The pages crawled from Facebook network are grouped according to users’ interests and analyzed to retrieve users’ profiles from eac...

The rapid evolution of information, communication and entertainment technologies will transform the lives of citizens and ultimately transform society. This paper focuses on ethical issues associated with the likely convergence of virtual realities (VR) and social networks (SNs), hereafter VRSNs. We examine a scenario in which a significant segment of the world's population has a presence in a ...