This book offers a holistic framework to study behavior and evolutionary dynamics in large-scale, decentralized, and heterogeneous crowd networks. In the emerging crowd cyber-ecosystems, millions of deeply connected individuals, smart devices, government agencies, and enterprises actively interact with each other and influence each other’s decisions. It is crucial to understand such intelligent entities’ behaviors and to study their strategic interactions in order to provide important guidelines on the design of reliable networks capable of predicting and preventing detrimental events with negative impacts on our society and economy.

This book reviews the fundamental methodologies to study user interactions and evolutionary dynamics in crowd networks and discusses recent advances in this emerging interdisciplinary research field. Using information diffusion over social networks as an example, it presents a thorough investigation of the impact of user behavior on the network evolution process and demonstrates how this can help improve network performance. Intended for graduate students and researchers from various disciplines, including but not limited to, data science, networking, signal processing, complex systems, and economics, the book encourages researchers in related research fields to explore the many untouched areas in this domain, and ultimately to design crowd networks with efficient, effective, and reliable services.