Saturated total-population dependent branching process and viral markets

Interesting posts are continually forwarded by the users of the online social network (OSN). Such propagation leads to re-forwarding of the post to some of the previous recipients, which increases as the post reaches a large number of users. Consequently, the effective forwards (after deleting the re-forwards) reduce, eventually leading to the saturation of the total number of copies. We model this process as a new variant of the branching process, the ‘saturated total-population-dependent branching process’, and analyse it using the stochastic approximation technique. Notably, we obtain deterministic trajectories which approximate the total and unread copies of the post ‘asymptotically and almost surely’ over any finite time window; this trajectory depends only on four parameters related to the network characteristics. Further, we provide expressions for the peak unread copies, maximum outreach and the life span of the post. We observe known exponential growth but with time-varying rates. We also validate our theory through detailed simulations on the SNAP Twitter dataset.