Random or preferential? Evolutionary mechanism of user behavior in co-creation community

The objective of this paper is to examine the evolutionary mechanism regarding how a co-creation community network evolves as the growth of user interaction, which differs from the existing studies concentrating on the explanation of the forward problems of information management systems (e.g. motivational identification of user participation and examination of users' outcomes). To achieve this objective, network generation model is formulated as nodes of users, ties of user's interactions, random process, and preferential attachment. Then, real networks formulated by practice and artificial networks generated by the proposed model are compared by cumulative degree distribution, so as to validate the feasibility of the proposed model and to explain user behavior from the perspective of link formulation. Results indicate that: (i) new users account for main contributions for the development of co-creation community; (ii) new users prefer to interact high-influence all the time, while old users interchangeably choose preferential attachment or random linking in different time periods, (iii) the initial number of users, the probability for choosing preferential attachment or random attachment has a great influence on the properties of a user interactive network.