Stable and emergent network topologies: A structural approach

Economic, social and military networks have at least one thing in common: they change over time. For various reasons, nodes form and terminate links, thereby rearranging the network. In this paper, we present a structural network mechanism that formalizes a possible incentive that guides nodes in constructing their local network structure. The mechanism assumes that nodes deliberately form and terminate links as they attempt to gain network advantage and/or an identifiable position in the network. Reiteration of this mechanism, which only uses local network characteristics, results in emergent, stable network topologies. Examples are uni-polar networks, bi-polar networks and cycle-networks. This process illustrates that local, binary decisions shape global network structures. These results may be used to derive some rules of thumb for designing networks.