Strategic Network Formation with Structural Holes

DESCRIPTION/ABSTRACT:

Dr. Siddharth Suri's talk is the third in Calit2's 2008-09 Behavioral, Social and Computer Sciences Seminar Series.

Abstract: A fundamental principle in social network research is that individuals can benefit from serving as intermediaries between others who are not directly connected. Through such intermediation, they potentially can broker the flow of information and synthesize ideas arising in different parts of the network. These principles form the underpinning for the theory of structural holes, which studies the ways in which individuals, particularly in organizational settings, fill the holes between people or groups that are not otherwise interacting.


We apply a game-theoretic approach to this notion, studying the structures that evolve when individuals in a social network have incentives to form links that bridge otherwise disconnected parties. We model payoffs as a trade-off between the benefits of connecting non-neighboring nodes, and the cost, in effort, to maintain links — including settings where the costs are non-uniform to reflect the increased difficulty in spanning different parts of a hierarchical organization.


We find, both through theoretical results and computational experiments, that the equilibrium networks in this model have rich combinatorial structure, and capture qualitative observations arising in the study of structural holes. In particular, even in completely symmetric settings, individuals will differentiate themselves in equilibrium, occupying different social strata and receiving correspondingly different payoffs.




SPEAKER BIO:


Dr. Siddharth Suri joined the Human & Social Dynamics group at Yahoo! Research led by Duncan Watts in August 2008. Prior to that he was a postdoctoral associate working with Jon Kleinberg in the computer science department at Cornell University. Suri earned his Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania in January 2007 under the supervision of Michael Kearns. If you would like more information about his background, please see his CV.

Suri's research takes an interdisciplinary approach in studying the computational aspects of social networks as well as economic networks. Many modern technological networks such as the Internet, the World Wide Web, Facebook, and eBay involve social and/or economic interactions. Thus, he uses theories from sociology and models from economics in his study of algorithmic questions about these types of networks. For more information please see his research statement.

Selected publications:

Strategic Network Formation with Structural Holes, J.Kleinberg, S. Suri, É. Tardos, and T. Wexler, EC 2008

An Experimental Study of the Coloring Problem on Human Subject Networks, M. Kearns, S. Suri, and N. Montfort, Science, 313(5788):824-827, 2006

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Strategic
• Network
• Formation
• with
• Structural
• Holes
• Siddharth
• Suri
• Behavioral
• Social
• and
• Computer
• Sciences
• Seminar
• Series
• UCSD
• Calit2