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Full-Text Articles in Communication
Information And Contact-Making In Policy Networks: A Model With Evidence From The U.S. Health Policy Domain, Daniel Carpenter, Kevin Esterling, David Lazer
Information And Contact-Making In Policy Networks: A Model With Evidence From The U.S. Health Policy Domain, Daniel Carpenter, Kevin Esterling, David Lazer
David Lazer
Theory: The political information that lobbyists seek is distributed in a communications network. Individual lobbyists must therefore choose their contacts carefully. We wed rational choice theory to network analysis in a combinatorial optimization model of lobbyists’ choice of contacts in a network. The model demonstrates the growing importance of political "friends" relative to acquaintances as contacts when the competition for information among groups rises. Hypotheses: Our model predicts that when the general demand for political information is low, a cocktail equilibrium prevails: lobbyists will invest their time in gaining "weak tie" political acquaintances rather than in gaining "strong tie" political …
The Network Structure Of Exploration And Exploitation, David Lazer, Allan Friedman
The Network Structure Of Exploration And Exploitation, David Lazer, Allan Friedman
David Lazer
Whether as team members brainstorming or cultures experimenting with new technologies, problem solvers communicate and share ideas. This paper examines how the structure of communication networks among actors can affect system-level performance. We present an agent-based computer simulation model of information sharing in which the less successful emulate the more successful. Results suggest that when agents are dealing with a complex problem, the more efficient the network at disseminating information, the better the short-run but the lower the long-run performance of the system. The dynamic underlying this result is that an inefficient network maintains diversity in the system and is …