Real-world information communities exhibit inherent structures that characterize a system that is stable and efficient for content production and consumption. This paper studies such structures through mathematical modeling and analysis by formulating a generic model of a community in which each member decides how they allocate their time between content production and consumption with the objective of maximizing their individual reward. The community system is defined as “stable and efficient” when a Nash equilibrium is reached while the social welfare of the community is maximized. The analysis results show that the structure with “a small core of celebrity producers” is the optimally stable and efficient for a community – this provides possible explanations to the sociological observations such as “the Law of the Few” and also provides insights into how to effectively build and maintain the structure of information communities.
