Controlling Information Diffusion with Irrational Users

Understanding how information propagates over networks is critical to the development of online social networking. Different from existing works on modeling the rational behaviors in information diffusion, in this paper, we focus on the study of how to control the information propagation over networks through the use of irrational users. With the help of graphical evolutionary game theory, we analyze how the irrational users influence the rational neighbors and thus the whole rational networks. Simulation results verify our theoretic analysis, and show that with a few irrational users, the number of rational users adopting the forwarding strategy can be significantly increased, i.e., we are able to control the information diffusion with irrational users.