Leaders emergence in artificial populations: the role of networks

Social networks can be viewed as graphs in their basic form, but many networks of interest include positive and negative affect relations among nodes. The structural balance theory originally developed by Heider suggests how nodes may locally modify their relationships to maintain a sort of balance within sets of nodes. We analyze a model of leadership emergence in a social network and extend it by introducing structural balance among members when modeling the attitude toward the leader. This approach takes into account some of the mutual relationships among co-workers, including the adaptation process to achieve the balance. This component helps to explore differently the bounded rationality of agents when interacting, and prove the difficulty of finding a rapid and smooth covergent path to a social stable equilibrium. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014