Nicolas Carayol
U. Paris XI

Carayol

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(Thursday, 24th May 2007)

Title : The formation and the structure of social networks: theory and empirics

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In this workshop, I try to present in a comprehensive manner, the state of the art on the study of social networks.

The student will be provided the main tools that are commonly used to measure networks as well as the main models that can explain how such networks came to be formed.

The main pieces of work we will refer to come from the field of statistical physics and from the recent papers on networks in the field of theoretical economics. The originality of the economic approach is that it considers the strategic formation of social networks.

At the end of the workshop, I shall present some results of a personal work which intends to show that the strategic approach can explain the formation of real & complex networks based on co-invention data.

Bibliographical references :

1. A survey on networks in various fields (mainly applied math and physics)
M. E. J. Newman, 2003, The structure and function of complex networks, SIAM Review 45, 167-256.

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Must read reference :

2. Two surveys on networks (mainly network formation in theoretical economics)

  • Shorter and more comprehensive one:

Jackson, M., 2007, The study of social networks in economics, forthcoming in “the missing links: formation and decay of economic networks.

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  • More detailed for an advanced reading:

Jackson, M., 2006, The Economics of Social Networks, mimeo, to appear in the Proceedings of the 9th World Congress of the Econometric Society, edited by Richard Blundell, Whitney Newey, and Torsten Persson, Cambridge University Press.

Download - 1.18 MB

3. Personal paper that tries to mix the two dimensions:

Carayol N., Roux P., 2007, The strategic formation of inter-individual collaboration networks: empirical evidence from co-invention patterns.

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