Incorporating power into joint social activity negotiation

Interaction and communication with others are necessary to maintain relationships, however individuals are not equal and there is often a level of give-and-take in relationships. Power has been proposed in the social network literature and later demonstrated as a suitable method for describing such an inequality. We propose a specification of power/dependence in the context of negotiating joint social activities. An agent-based simulation with both a spatial and social network is developed in which pairs of individuals decide whether to plan an activity with each other, and if so, when and where they will meet. We show that the inclusion of power can affect location choice and the amount of travel undertaken: weaker individuals are more likely to compromise on preferences and tend to travel more when power is incorporated.