The Reason Behind the Scale-Free World

Most of the real-world networks, existing in nature or observed in the world of technology, follow the power-law degree distribution, and thus, they are called scale-free networks. Barabási first observed that the scale-free network is formed by preferential attachment of new nodes in the existing network. Therefore, a new node is more likely to make a connection with a node having higher neighbor degree in the network. In this paper, we find that greedy decision making is one of the key characteristics for the transformation of a regular network to a scale-free network. Greedy decision making results in long-ranged link affinity, a phenomenon responsible for hub-node creation in the network. Moreover, we show that pure random addition of new links in a regular network does not result in a scale-free network.