Information dynamics shape the sexual networks of Internet-mediated prostitution

DOI10.1073/PNAS.0914080107MaRDI QIDQ3073976zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Luis E. C. Rocha, Fredrik Liljeros, Petter Holme

Publication date 12 February 2011

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1003.3089

zbMATH Keywords

complex networksnetwork topologynetwork dynamics

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Social networks; opinion dynamics (91D30) Information theory (general) (94A15) Internet topics (68M11)

Abstract: Like many other social phenomena, prostitution is increasingly coordinated over the Internet. The online behavior affects the offline activity; the reverse is also true. We investigated the reported sexual contacts between 6,624 anonymous escorts and 10,106 sex-buyers extracted from an online community from its beginning and six years on. These sexual encounters were also graded and categorized (in terms of the type of sexual activities performed) by the buyers. From the temporal, bipartite network of posts, we found a full feedback loop in which high grades on previous posts affect the future commercial success of the sex-worker, and vice versa. We also found a peculiar growth pattern in which the turnover of community members and sex workers causes a sublinear preferential attachment. There is, moreover, a strong geographic influence on network structure-the network is geographically clustered but still close to connected, the contacts consistent with the inverse-square law observed in trading patterns. We also found that the number of sellers scales sublinearly with city size, so this type of prostitution does not, comparatively speaking, benefit much from an increasing concentration of people.

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Cites work

• Connectivity and inference problems for temporal networks
• Empirical Analysis of an Evolving Social Network
• The Structure and Function of Complex Networks

Cited in

(14)

• The Bethe Hessian and information theoretic approaches for online change-point detection in network data
• The patient-zero problem with noisy observations
• Asymptotic theory of time varying networks with burstiness and heterogeneous activation patterns
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• Components in time-varying graphs
• Temporal interactions facilitate endemicity in the susceptible-infected-susceptible epidemic model
• Exploring concurrency and reachability in the presence of high temporal resolution
• Control strategies of contagion processes in time-varying networks
• Complex dynamics of synergistic coinfections on realistically clustered networks
• Epidemic threshold in temporally-switching networks
• Random walk centrality for temporal networks
• A generalized theory of preferential linking
• Broadband internet: an information superhighway to sex crime?
• Identification of influential spreaders in bipartite networks: a singular value decomposition approach

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