Re: Social Capital

[Catherine Dibble]

hi Claudia,

Yes, there is a particularly interesting paper on this topic by 
Troy Tassier and Filippo Menczer at the U of Iowa.  They
addressed job markets, but their agent-based model of 
social network formation has much broader and very interesting
implications for social capital in general and for related policies.
Leigh Tesfatsion's page of Network Researchers has a link to
Menczer's research site.

If it has not just appeared, this paper should be forthcoming soon 
in the _IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation_.    Here
is its abstract:

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"Evolving Referral Networks in the Job Market" 
by Troy Tassier (U of Iowa) and Filippo Menczer (U of Iowa)

ABSTRACT: We model a labor market that includes referral 
networks using an agent-based simulation. Agents maximize their 
employment satisfaction by allocating resources to build friendship 
networks and by adjusting search intensity. We use a local-selection 
evolutionary algorithm, which maintains a diverse population of 
strategies, to study the adaptive graph topologies resulting from 
the model. The evolved networks display mixtures of regularity and 
randomness, as in small-world networks. A second characteristic 
emerges in our model as time progresses: the population loses 
efficiency due to over-competition for job referral contacts in a 
way similar to social dilemmas such as the tragedy of the commons. 
Analysis reveals that the loss of global fitness is driven by an 
increase in individual robustness, which allows agents to live 
longer by surviving job losses. The behavior of our model suggests 
predictions for a number of policies.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Best regards,

Catherine
*============================================*
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 citizens can change the world.          -- Margaret Mead

 Catherine Dibble                       address@hidden
 Department of Geography          www.glue.umd.edu/~cdibble   
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