Algorithm Design
The price of selfish behavior in bilateral network formation
Proceedings of the twenty-fourth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
Strategic network formation with structural holes
ACM SIGecom Exchanges
Contribution games in social networks
ESA'10 Proceedings of the 18th annual European conference on Algorithms: Part I
Game theoretic models for social network analysis
Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web
Bounded budget betweenness centrality game for strategic network formations
Theoretical Computer Science
Vertex neighborhoods, low conductance cuts, and good seeds for local community methods
Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Brief announcement: brokerage and closure in a strategic model of social capital
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
Mining structural hole spanners through information diffusion in social networks
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web
Finding influencers in networks using social capital
Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
Finding critical blocks of information diffusion in social networks
WAIM'13 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Web-Age Information Management
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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.