Diffusion Centrality: Foundations and Extensions

We first clarify the precise theoretical foundations behind the notion of diffusion centrality. This allows us to address a minor inconsistency in the model description of Banerjee et al. (2013). We then identify unnatural implicit assumptions in the model of political intermediation proposed by Cruz, Labonne & Querubfn (2017). We introduce two extensions of diffusion centrality, targeting centrality and reachability, which we believe better capture features of contexts with targeted requests. We derive general explicit formulas to compute these new measures.