Mechanism Of Interference Effects In Social Information Foraging

Technology progress and rapid development of Internet make people have to face the huge amounts of information. It is the problem that finding useful information efficiently among these vast amounts of information. Pirolli who first proposed Information Foraging Theory summarized previous relevant knowledge and built up a basic model of social information foraging (SIF). This model simulates the information foraging behavior of individuals in social network, and draws out the curve of relation between group size and individual rate of return in social environment. Because the interference effects mentioned in his paper are too simple, the model is distorted. This paper studied the interference effects in-depth of the basic model of SIF, and proposed the Diversity-Interference theory based on the social information foraging theory, social behavior theory, and group diversity theory. Ultimately, I built the Interference Correction Model, and amended the curve of relation between group size and individual rate of return. In the end of the paper, I verified the reasonability of this correction model.