2026-07-072026-07-07http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/123840We introduce a new mechanism of connectivity evolution in networks to account for the emergence of scale-free behavior. The mechanism works on a fixed set of nodes and promotes growth from a minimally connected initial topology by the addition of edges. A new edge is added between two nodes depending on the trade-off between a gain and a cost function of local connectivity and communication properties. We report on simulation results that indicate the appearance of power-law distributions of node degrees for selected parameter combinations.Statistical Mechanicstext