Does more connectivity help groups to solve social problems

Authors:
Daniel P. Enemark;Mathew D. McCubbins;Ramamohan Paturi;Nicholas Weller
Affiliations:
University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA;University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA;University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA;University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 12th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Year:
2011

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Abstract

A growing literature on human networks suggests that the way we are connected influences both individual and group outcomes. Recent experimental studies in the social and computer sciences have claimed that higher network connectivity helps individuals solve coordination problems. However, this is not always the case, especially when we consider complex coordination tasks; we demonstrate that networks can have both constraining edges that inhibit collective action and redundant edges that encourage it. We show that the constraints imposed by additional edges can impede coordination even though these edges also increase communication. By contrast, edges that do not impose additional constraints facilitate coordination, as described in previous work. We explain why the negative effect of constraint trumps the positive effect of communication by analyzing coordination games as a special case of widely-studied constraint satisfaction problems. The results help us to understand the importance of problem complexity and network connections, and how different types of connections can influence real-world coordination.