Diversity and Popularity in Organizations and Communities

  • Authors:

  • Walid Nasrallah;Peter Glynn;Raymond Levitt

  • Affiliations:

  • Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305. walid@alum.mit.edu;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305. glynn@leland.stanford.edu;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305. rel@ce.stanford.edu

  • Venue:
  • Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

This paper examines social groupings whose structuredepends only on the distribution of ability to attract attention.When people‘s attention is a scarce resource, those individuals whoare rated highest by a large number of other individuals will have toration their attention, resulting in constraints on the socialstructure of the group. The incidence of popular individuals by thatdefinition reflects the extent to which individuals agree on whotheir highest-rated colleague is. We propose three basicdistributions or ways to generate the matrix of perceived ability soas to yield popularity profiles that can be parametrically adjustedto match observations. We demonstrate that each of these assumptionsets leads to a slightly different correlation between the value ofthe assumption‘s parameter and the set of observable popularitypatterns. Since popularity, in real life, often determines suchthings as power, centrality, over-utilization and perhaps reducedaccessibility, having more realistic ways of representing it isimportant for modeling and understanding virtual organizations andcommunities.