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Power indices of influence games and new centrality measures for social networks

In social network analysis, there is a common perception that influence is relevant to determine the global behavior of the society and thus it can be used to enforce cooperation by targeting an adequate initial set of individuals or to analyze global choice processes. Here we propose centrality measures that can be used to analyze the relevance of the actors in process related to spread of influence. In [39] it was considered a multiagent system in which the agents are eager to perform a collective task depending on the perception of the willingness to perform the task of other individuals. The setting is modeled using a notion of simple games called influence games. Those games are defined on graphs were the nodes are labeled by their influence threshold and the spread of influence between its nodes is used to determine whether a coalition is winning or not. Influence games provide tools to measure the importance of the actors of a social network by means of classic power indices and provide a framework to consider new centrality criteria. In this paper we consider two of the most classical power indices, i.e., Banzhaf and Shapley-Shubik indices, as centrality measures for social networks in influence games. Although there is some work related to specific scenarios of game-theoretic networks, here we use such indices as centrality measures in any social network where the spread of influence phenomenon can be applied. Further, we define new centrality measures such as satisfaction and effort that, as far as we know, have not been considered so far. We also perform a comparison of the proposed measures with other three classic centrality measures, degree, closeness and betweenness, considering three social networks. We show that in some cases our measurements provide centrality hierarchies similar to those of other measures, while in other cases provide different hierarchies.