  In human societies, people's willingness to compete and strive for better
social status as well as being envious of those perceived in some way superior
lead to social structures that are intrinsically hierarchical. Here we propose
an agent-based, network model to mimic the ranking behaviour of individuals and
its possible repercussions in human society. The main ingredient of the model
is the assumption that the relevant feature of social interactions is each
individual's keenness to maximise his or her status relative to others. The
social networks produced by the model are homophilous and assortative, as
frequently observed in human communities and most of the network properties
seem quite independent of its size. However, it is seen that for small number
of agents the resulting network consists of disjoint weakly connected
communities while being highly assortative and homophilic. On the other hand
larger networks turn out to be more cohesive with larger communities but less
homophilic. We find that the reason for these changes is that larger network
size allows agents to use new strategies for maximizing their social status
allowing for more diverse links between them.
