14,730 research outputs found
Measuring Tie Strength in Implicit Social Networks
Given a set of people and a set of events they attend, we address the problem
of measuring connectedness or tie strength between each pair of persons given
that attendance at mutual events gives an implicit social network between
people. We take an axiomatic approach to this problem. Starting from a list of
axioms that a measure of tie strength must satisfy, we characterize functions
that satisfy all the axioms and show that there is a range of measures that
satisfy this characterization. A measure of tie strength induces a ranking on
the edges (and on the set of neighbors for every person). We show that for
applications where the ranking, and not the absolute value of the tie strength,
is the important thing about the measure, the axioms are equivalent to a
natural partial order. Also, to settle on a particular measure, we must make a
non-obvious decision about extending this partial order to a total order, and
that this decision is best left to particular applications. We classify
measures found in prior literature according to the axioms that they satisfy.
In our experiments, we measure tie strength and the coverage of our axioms in
several datasets. Also, for each dataset, we bound the maximum Kendall's Tau
divergence (which measures the number of pairwise disagreements between two
lists) between all measures that satisfy the axioms using the partial order.
This informs us if particular datasets are well behaved where we do not have to
worry about which measure to choose, or we have to be careful about the exact
choice of measure we make.Comment: 10 page
Growing Attributed Networks through Local Processes
This paper proposes an attributed network growth model. Despite the knowledge
that individuals use limited resources to form connections to similar others,
we lack an understanding of how local and resource-constrained mechanisms
explain the emergence of rich structural properties found in real-world
networks. We make three contributions. First, we propose a parsimonious and
accurate model of attributed network growth that jointly explains the emergence
of in-degree distributions, local clustering, clustering-degree relationship
and attribute mixing patterns. Second, our model is based on biased random
walks and uses local processes to form edges without recourse to global network
information. Third, we account for multiple sociological phenomena: bounded
rationality, structural constraints, triadic closure, attribute homophily, and
preferential attachment. Our experiments indicate that the proposed Attributed
Random Walk (ARW) model accurately preserves network structure and attribute
mixing patterns of six real-world networks; it improves upon the performance of
eight state-of-the-art models by a statistically significant margin of 2.5-10x.Comment: 11 pages, 13 figure
Interdependent policy instrument preferences: a two-mode network approach
In policymaking, actors are likely to take the preferences of others into account when strategically positioning themselves. However, there is a lack of research that conceives of policy preferences as an interdependent system. In order to analyse interdependencies, we link actors to their policy preferences in water protection, which results in an actor-instrument network. As actors exhibit multiple preferences, a complex two-mode network between actors and policies emerges. We analyse whether actors exhibit interdependent preference profiles given shared policy objectives or social interactions among them. By fitting an exponential random graph model to the actor-instrument network, we find considerable clustering, meaning that actors tend to exhibit preferences for multiple policy instruments in common. Actors tend to exhibit interdependent policy preferences when they are interconnected, that is, they collaborate with each other. By contrast, actors are less likely to share policy preferences when a conflict line divides them
The Dynamics of Interfirm Networks along the Industry Life Cycle: The Case of the Global Video Games Industry 1987-2007
In this paper, we study the formation of network ties between firms along the life cycle of a creative industry. We focus on three drivers of network formation: i) network endogeneity which stresses a path-dependent change originating from previous network structures, ii) five forms of proximity (e.g. geographical proximity) which ascribe tie formation to the similarity of actors' attributes; and (iii) individual characteristics which refer to the heterogeneity in actors capabilities to exploit external knowledge. The paper employs a stochastic actor-oriented model to estimate the - changing - effects of these drivers on inter-firm network formation in the global video game industry from 1987 to 2007. Our findings indicate that the effects of the drivers of network formation change with the degree of maturity of the industry. To an increasing extent, video game firms tend to partner over shorter distances and with more cognitively similar firms as the industry evolves.network dynamics, industry life cycle, proximity, creative industry, video game industry, stochastic actor-oriented model
Consumer Perspectives of Brand Extension Effects : Information Analysis Determining the Consumer Behaviour Patterns
Brands are successful because people prefer them to ordinary products. In addition to the psychological factors already mentioned, brands give consumers the means whereby they can make choices and judgments. The secret to successful branding is to influence the decisions the way in which consumers perceive the company or product, and brands can affect the minds of customers by appealing to the information acquired and analyzed. This paper attempts to emphasize the relationship between empirical and theoretical considerations in the information analysis of brand extensions on consumer behavior. Broadly the study focuses on analysis at the individual or micro-level and tries to draw implications towards buying decisions on the extended brands analyzing the aggregate relationships. The discussion analyzes categorical similarity as a determinant of diagnostic behaviour and explore the premise that high accessibility of extension information in some of the past studies may have left little room to observe the effects of diagnostic behaviour.Brand Extension, Consumer Behaviour, Decision Making
Implications and Ramifications of a Sample-Size Approach to Intuition
[...from the chapter] In the present article, we delineate a different approach, which is by no means inconsistent, but largely overlaps with the aforementioned definitions. However, our approach is simpler and refrains from a number of rather strong assumptions to which other conceptions subscribe. Using a simple and straightforward criterion, we define intuition in terms of the size of the sample used in reaching a decision: Judgments and decisions are intuitive to the extent that they rest on small samples.
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