22 research outputs found
The impact of functional and social value on the price of goods
According to hedonic pricing theory (HPT) market forces operate on individual characteristics of a good, and the price of a product is the aggregate of the price across those characteristics. The relationship between price and characteristics remains poorly understood because characteristic qualities are hard to quantify, people have varying levels of information about characteristics, and people have heterogeneous preferences over characteristics. By analyzing data from a large, market-driven virtual world we are able to test HPT, while largely avoiding these pitfalls. We find that a linear model with functional characteristics predicts the prices poorly, but a log-linear model performs quite well. Adding social characteristics to this log-linear model improves the predictions substantially. This work strongly supports HPT and demonstrates a "rational" calculus including social value
Social Stability and Extended Social Balance - Quantifying the Role of Inactive Links in Social Networks
Structural balance in social network theory starts from signed networks with
active relationships (friendly or hostile) to establish a hierarchy between
four different types of triadic relationships. The lack of an active link also
provides information about the network. To exploit the information that remains
uncovered by structural balance, we introduce the inactive relationship that
accounts for both neutral and nonexistent ties between two agents. This
addition results in ten types of triads, with the advantage that the network
analysis can be done with complete networks. To each type of triadic
relationship, we assign an energy that is a measure for its average occupation
probability. Finite temperatures account for a persistent form of disorder in
the formation of the triadic relationships. We propose a Hamiltonian with three
interaction terms and a chemical potential (capturing the cost of edge
activation) as an underlying model for the triadic energy levels. Our model is
suitable for empirical analysis of political networks and allows to uncover
generative mechanisms. It is tested on an extended data set for the standings
between two classes of alliances in a massively multi-player on-line game
(MMOG) and on real-world data for the relationships between countries during
the Cold War era. We find emergent properties in the triadic relationships
between the nodes in a political network. For example, we observe a persistent
hierarchy between the ten triadic energy levels across time and networks. In
addition, the analysis reveals consistency in the extracted model parameters
and a universal data collapse of a derived combination of global properties of
the networks. We illustrate that the model has predictive power for the
transition probabilities between the different triadic states.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figure
Statistical physics of balance theory
Triadic relationships are accepted to play a key role in the dynamics of social and political networks. Building on insights gleaned from balance theory in social network studies and from Boltzmann-Gibbs statistical physics, we propose a model to quantitatively capture the dynamics of the four types of triadic relationships in a network. Central to our model are the triadsâ incidence rates and the idea that those can be modeled by assigning a specific triadic energy to each type of triadic relation. We emphasize the role of the degeneracy of the different triads and how it impacts the degree of frustration in the political network. In order to account for a persistent form of disorder in the formation of the triadic relationships, we introduce the systemic variable temperature. In order to learn about the dynamics and motives, we propose a generic Hamiltonian with three terms to model the triadic energies. One term is connected with a three-body interaction that captures balance theory. The other terms take into account the impact of heterogeneity and of negative edges in the triads. The validity of our model is tested on four datasets including the time series of triadic relationships for the standings between two classes of alliances in a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG). We also analyze real-world data for the relationships between the âagentsâ involved in the Syrian civil war, and in the relations between countries during the Cold War era. We find emerging properties in the triadic relationships in a political network, for example reflecting itself in a persistent hierarchy between the four triadic energies, and in the consistency of the extracted parameters from comparing the model Hamiltonian to the data
Properties of the network of EVEâs alliances.
<p><b>Left:</b> Daily values of the density of complete triads and the density of edges for two classes of alliances in EVE Online. <b>Right:</b> Daily values of the clustering coefficients of the network of positive (â+Netâ) and negative relationships (ââNetâ) for the SOV and +200 alliances in EVE Online.</p
Time series of the entropy for the triadic relationships in EVE Online.
<p>Daily values of the entropy <i>S</i><sub><i>T</i></sub> for the occupation probability of the four types of triads in the relationships between the SOV (dashed line) and the +200 (solid line) alliances in EVE Online. The entropies associated with the networks of randomly assigned edges are <i>S</i><sub><i>T</i></sub> = 8.152 ± 0.011<i>K</i> (SOV) and <i>S</i><sub><i>T</i></sub> = 8.152 ± 0.066<i>K</i> (+200).</p
Evolution of the number of nodes in the network of alliance relations.
<p>Daily evolution of the number of alliances in EVE Online from February 2015 through April 2016. We discriminate between alliances with sovereignty (SOV) and alliances with more than 200 members (+200).</p