Statistical modelling of information sharing: Community, membership, and content

Abstract

File-sharing systems, like many online and traditional information sharing communities (e.g. newsgroups, BBS, forums, interest clubs), are dynamical systems in nature. As peers get in and out of the system, the information content made available by the prevailing membership varies continually in amount as well as composition, which in turn affects all peers’ join/leave decisions. As a result, the dynamics of membership and information content are strongly coupled, suggesting interesting issues about growth, sustenance, and stability.

In this paper, we propose to study such communities with a simple statistical model of an <i>information sharing club</i>. Carrying their private payloads of information goods as potential supply to the club, peers join or leave on the basis of whether the information they demand is currently available. Information goods are chunked and <i>typed</i>, as in a file-sharing system where peers contribute different files, or a forum where messages are grouped by topics or threads. Peers’ demand and supply are then characterized by statistical distributions over the type domain.

This model reveals interesting critical behaviour with multiple equilibria. A sharp growth threshold is derived: the club may grow towards a sustainable equilibrium only if the value of an control parameter is above the threshold, or shrink to emptiness otherwise. The <i>control parameter</i> is composite and comprises the peer population size, the level of their contributed supply, the club’s efficiency in information search, the spread of supply and demand over the type domain, as well as the goodness of match between them.