An Analysis of the Matching Hypothesis in Networks

The matching hypothesis in social psychology claims that people are more likely to form a committed relationship with someone equally attractive. Previous works on stochastic models of human mate choice process indicate that patterns supporting the matching hypothesis could occur even when similarity is not the primary consideration in seeking partners. Yet, most if not all of these works concentrate on fully-connected systems. Here we extend the analysis to networks. Our results indicate that the correlation of the couples attractiveness grows monotonically with the increased average degree and decreased degree diversity of the network. This correlation is lower in sparse networks than in fully-connected systems, because in the former less attractive individuals who find partners are likely to be coupled with ones who are more attractive than them. The chance of failing to be matched decreases exponentially with both the attractiveness and the degree. The matching hypothesis may not hold when the degree-attractiveness correlation is present, which can give rise to negative attractiveness correlation. Finally, we find that the ratio between the number of matched couples and the size of the maximum matching varies non-monotonically with the average degree of the network. Our results reveal the role of network topology in the process of human mate choice and bring insights into future investigations of different matching processes in networks.

Critical Points of Correlated Percolation in a Gravitational Link-adding Network Model

Motivated by the importance of geometric information in real systems, a new model for long-range correlated percolation in link-adding networks is proposed with the connecting probability decaying with a power-law of the distance on the two-dimensional(2D) plane. By overlapping it with Achlioptas process, it serves as a gravity model which can be tuned to facilitate or inhibit the network percolation in a generic view, cover a broad range of thresholds. Moreover, it yields a set of new scaling relations. In the present work, we develop an approach to determine critical points for them by simulating the temporal evolutions of type-I, type-II and type-III links(chosen from both inter-cluster links, an intra-cluster link compared with an inter-cluster one, and both intra-cluster ones, respectively) and corresponding average lengths. Numerical results have revealed objective competition between fractions, average lengths of three types of links, verified the balance happened at critical points. The variation of decay exponents $a$ or transmission radius $R$ always shifts the temporal pace of the evolution, while the steady average lengths and the fractions of links always keep unchanged just as the values in Achlioptas process. Strategy with maximum gravity can keep steady average length, while that with minimum one can surpass it. Without the confinement of transmission range, $bar{l} to infty$ in thermodynamic limit, while $bar{l}$ does not when with it. However, both mechanisms support critical points. In two-dimensional free space, the relevance of correlated percolation in link-adding process is verified by validation of new scaling relations with various exponent $a$, which violates the scaling law of Weinribs.