  This paper focuses on social cloud formation, where agents are involved in a
closeness-based conditional resource sharing and build their resource sharing
network themselves. The objectives of this paper are: (1) to investigate the
impact of agents' decisions of link addition and deletion on their local and
global resource availability, (2) to analyze spillover effects in terms of the
impact of link addition between a pair of agents on others' utility, (3) to
study the role of agents' closeness in determining what type of spillover
effects these agents experience in the network, and (4) to model the choices of
agents that suggest with whom they want to add links in the social cloud. The
findings include the following. Firstly, agents' decision of link addition
(deletion) increases (decreases) their local resource availability. However,
these observations do not hold in the case of global resource availability.
Secondly, in a connected network, agents experience either positive or negative
spillover effect and there is no case with no spillover effects. Agents observe
no spillover effects if and only if the network is disconnected and consists of
more than two components (sub-networks). Furthermore, if there is no change in
the closeness of an agent (not involved in link addition) due to a newly added
link, then the agent experiences negative spillover effect. Although an
increase in the closeness of agents is necessary in order to experience
positive spillover effects, the condition is not sufficient. By focusing on
parameters such as closeness and shortest distances, we provide conditions
under which agents choose to add links so as to maximise their resource
availability.
