Digital Commons Network^™

A Social Network Perspective On Measurements Of Dominance Hierarchies, Daizaburo Shizuka, David B. Mcdonald

School of Biological Sciences: Faculty Publications

The hierarchical organization of dominance relations among animals has wide-ranging implications in social evolution. The structure of dominance relations has often been measured using indices of linearity (e.g. Landau’s h, Kendall’s K): the degree to which dominance relations adhere to a linear hierarchy. An alternative measure is the transitivity of dominance relations among sets of three players that all interact with each other, a measure we call triangle transitivity (t_tri). Triangle transitivity and linearity are essentially equivalent when dominance relations of all dyads are known, but such complete observations are rare in empirical studies. Triangle transitivity …