Evolution of Credit Scores of Enterprises in a Social Network: A Perspective Based on Opinion Dynamics

The use of social network to model the evolution of credit scores of networked enterprises is still a challenging task. This article develops an opinion dynamics model of the evolution of credit scores of enterprises in a social network. Firstly, based on the number of potential cooperated enterprises and the initial credit scores, the leader and follower enterprises are identified. Then, taking into consideration the cooperated benefit and discrimination cost, the cooperated utility between any two enterprises is calculated, which is used to compute the weights that one enterprise assigns to other enterprises. An opinion dynamics model on the evolution of credit scores of enterprises, inspired on the classical Friedkin–Johnsen’s social network model, is developed. Some desirable properties of the proposed opinion dynamics model are theoretically stated and proved. Finally, a numerical example is provided to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed opinion dynamics model, while a simulation analysis to investigate the joint influences of the connection probabilities and the network structure on the evolution of credit scores of enterprises is reported.