Network formation in online social network under information explosion

Due to people´s eagerness for interactions with others, online social network has been one of the most popular Internet services in the world. However, the most frustrating element is the overwhelming information users facing while using these applications on social networks. In this work, we investigate the effect of overloaded information on users´ behaviors in terms of the network formation of online social networks. In our model, the information is defined as the total number of friends the users´ friends have. For each user, there exists certain optimal information amount to maximize his utility function. We consider two cases here: the cost to send a friend request is either zero or greater than zero. We discover that when all users are myopic and the cost is greater than zero, the online social network is unlikely to grow. We also exemplify several equilibrium network examples and discuss their properties. The simulation results verify our theoretical analysis.