title: Emergence of a small world from local interactions: modeling acquaintance networks.
abstract: How do we make acquaintances? A simple observation from everyday experience is that often one of our acquaintances introduces us to one of his or her acquaintances. Such a simple triangle interaction may be viewed as the basis of the evolution of many social networks. Here, it is demonstrated that this assumption is sufficient to reproduce major nontrivial features of social networks: short path length, high clustering, and scale-free or exponential link distributions.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Kiel, Leibnizstrasse 15, D-24098 Kiel, Germany.
authors.forename: Jörn
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Davidsen
authors.forename: Holger
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Ebel
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bornholdt
mesh_terms: D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011157:Population Dynamics