Management Sciences and Quantitative Methods Commons^™

Revisiting The Small-World Phenomenon: Efficiency Variation And Classification Of Small-World Networks, Tore Opsahl, Antoine Vernet, Tufool Alnuaimi, Gerard George

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Research has explored how embeddedness in small-world networks influences individual and firm outcomes. We show that there remains significant heterogeneity among networks classified as small-world networks. We develop measures of the efficiency of a network, which allow us to refine predictions associated with small-world networks. A network is classified as a small-world network if it exhibits a distance between nodes that is comparable to the distance found in random networks of similar sizeswith ties randomly allocated among nodesin addition to containing dense clusters. To assess how efficient a network is, there are two questions worth asking: (a) What is a …