'Self-Organizing' Friendship Networks

We introduce principles of self-organization in a dynamic individual oriented model of the evolution of friendship networks. The main aim of the model is to explain the emergence of structure in a friendship network from an initial situation of mutual strangers. In contrast to the individual behavioral rules in previously developed models, we explicitly deal with the interplay between network dynamics and changing characteristics of individuals as a result of their friendships. Moreover, learning mechanisms and 'bounded' rationality principles, due to limited information and restricted capabilities to foresee strategically, are more explicitly dealt with. The incorporation of these elements is facilitated by the application of principles of self-organization known from the fields of cellular automata and neural networks.