scholarly journals Understanding network formation in strategy research: Exponential random graph models

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ji Youn Rose Kim ◽  
Michael Howard ◽  
Emily Cox Pahnke ◽  
Warren Boeker
2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier ◽  
Dino P. Christenson ◽  
Jason W. Morgan

In the study of social processes, the presence of unobserved heterogeneity is a regular concern. It should be particularly worrisome for the statistical analysis of networks, given the complex dependencies that shape network formation combined with the restrictive assumptions of related models. In this paper, we demonstrate the importance of explicitly accounting for unobserved heterogeneity in exponential random graph models (ERGM) with a Monte Carlo analysis and two applications that have played an important role in the networks literature. Overall, these analyses show that failing to account for unobserved heterogeneity can have a significant impact on inferences about network formation. The proposed frailty extension to the ERGM (FERGM) generally outperforms the ERGM in these cases, and does so by relatively large margins. Moreover, our novel multilevel estimation strategy has the advantage of avoiding the problem of degeneration that plagues the standard MCMC-MLE approach.


2021 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 225-238
Author(s):  
George G. Vega Yon ◽  
Andrew Slaughter ◽  
Kayla de la Haye

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 505-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Wojcik

Are the social networks of legislators affected more by their political parties or their personal traits? How does the party organization influence the tendency of members to work collectively on a day-to-day basis? In this paper, I explore the determinants of the relationships of legislators in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. I use exponential random graph models to evaluate the relative influence of personal traits versus party influence in generating legislator relationships. Despite a focus on personalism in Brazil, the analysis reveals that the effects of political parties on tie formation are roughly equal to the effects of personal traits, suggesting that networks may make political parties much more cohesive than contemporary literature would lead us to believe.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 1266-1276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian C Evans ◽  
David N Fisher ◽  
Matthew J Silk

Abstract Social network analysis is a suite of approaches for exploring relational data. Two approaches commonly used to analyze animal social network data are permutation-based tests of significance and exponential random graph models. However, the performance of these approaches when analyzing different types of network data has not been simultaneously evaluated. Here we test both approaches to determine their performance when analyzing a range of biologically realistic simulated animal social networks. We examined the false positive and false negative error rate of an effect of a two-level explanatory variable (e.g., sex) on the number and combined strength of an individual’s network connections. We measured error rates for two types of simulated data collection methods in a range of network structures, and with/without a confounding effect and missing observations. Both methods performed consistently well in networks of dyadic interactions, and worse on networks constructed using observations of individuals in groups. Exponential random graph models had a marginally lower rate of false positives than permutations in most cases. Phenotypic assortativity had a large influence on the false positive rate, and a smaller effect on the false negative rate for both methods in all network types. Aspects of within- and between-group network structure influenced error rates, but not to the same extent. In "grouping event-based" networks, increased sampling effort marginally decreased rates of false negatives, but increased rates of false positives for both analysis methods. These results provide guidelines for biologists analyzing and interpreting their own network data using these methods.


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 11-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Thiemichen ◽  
N. Friel ◽  
A. Caimo ◽  
G. Kauermann

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