Combining Game Theory And Social Networks: Is it a better strategy to have small and deep or large and shallow social network?
If you’re reading this, there’s a fighting chance I know you. Not because you’d only read this if you were my friend, but because I have one of the largest social networks of everyone I know, and I know a lot of people. In class, we spent some time talking about social networks, in fact, we even had someone from Facebook come and talk to us for an entire lecture. A network is a set of points/nodes with connections/edges between them. In a social network, the nodes are people, and an edge is present if they know each other. We saw how the relative power of someone in the network could be determined by looking at his/her connections with others. For example, if you have lot’s of connections, but most of the people you are connected to don’t have as many options, then you’re more powerful than them. For example, consider a simple network where person A knows B, and B knows C, but A and C don’t know each other. Then B could pit A and C against each other and interact with whoever is willing to give the most. We also learned about game theory. The subject of game theory is predicting what people will do when they compete with each other. Given a set of players, their strategies, and their payoffs for each strategy, game theory can predict stable combinations of strategies so that each player is doing as well as they can given what the other players are doing.
Too Big or Just Right? Optimal Circle of Friends Depends on Socioeconomic
It also references a two source scientific papers, which I cite below.
The article talks about two possible strategies for networking with others. One can either have a large social network with many weak social ties, or a small network with a few very strong ties. The authors there are two covariant factors that affect how optimal one of these strategies is over the other. The theory is that in good economic conditions, friends are less likely to need serious help, and its better to have many more, but consequently weaker friends. If however, economic conditions are bad, then its better to have a few close friends to rely and depend on. And since you are investing all of your energy in these friends, you don’t have nearly as many weak friends.
Mobility also affects the best networking strategy. Assuming that having friends is useful, which I think most people would agree with, then given a statistic like 10% of your friends will move away any given year, and that it is hard to maintain long distance relationships, it’s better to have a large friend network, so that when some of your friends move away you still have plenty of friends left, and hopefully when you move you’ll have a wide enough friend circle to know some people or be introduced to people who live where you’ll move to.
Of course there are many other considerations for real life social networks. Although I have a large social circle, it’s not necessarily for these reasons. Most of my large social circle comes very naturally from my personality I love talking to people, both talking about myself, and listening to others talking about themselves. The authors’ argument about a different best networking strategy for different socio-economic conditions makes sense, but I expect it only explains a small part of the variation in size between peoples social circles, and only a small component reason for my social network having the structure it does.
Citations:
Too Big or Just Right? Optimal Circle of Friends Depends on Socioeconomic
Oishi, S., Kesebir, S. (2012). Optimal social networking strategy is a function of socioeconomic conditions. Psychological Science. Vol 23:12 p 1542-1548
Oishi, S., Kesebir, S. (2013). Residential mobility increases motivation to expand social network: But why? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Vol 49:2 p 217-223