Analysis of the retweetting behavior of Weibo users based on game theory

Retweeting behavior is a key mechanism for information diffusion in Microbloging services such as Weibo. It is the mechanism of retweeting that leads to the fast and wide diffusion of information in Weibo. Game theory has been applied to various fields as an important tool for studying user´s behavior. In this paper, a game model has been applied on studying Weibo user´s retweeting behavior. We propose a user´s retweeting game model. By Markov equilibrium strategy (MPE) we estimate the retweeting probability of the message, of which the character and existence have been proved. Experiment results show that in the retweeting game model the trust factor δ and the number of information k have a great influence on the retweeting rate. Compared the retweeting game model with the Weibo data, we find that the retweeting game model can be used to describe the user´s retweeting behaviors.