XXXVI International Sunbelt Social Network Conference Presentation and Poster Abstract INSNA Newport Beach, CA April 5 to April 10, 2016
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XXXVI International Sunbelt Social Network Conference Presentation and Poster Abstract INSNA Newport Beach, CA April 5 to April 10, 2016 Contents Oral presentation abstracts 2 Poster presentation abstracts 255 1 Oral presentation abstracts Collaborations and Careers: Disentangling Quality Signaling from Collective Skill Formation in the Theater and Movie Industries Fabien Accominotti (LSE) This paper examines the social underpinnings of success and inequality by disentangling the various mechanisms - collective skill formation, relational quality signaling, and social capital accumulation - whereby collaborations shape the subsequent course of individual careers. The project builds on a unique administrative record of labor contracts in the French theater and motion picture industries from 1986 to 2005 to reconstruct the collaboration networks between artistic performers over that twenty-year period. Critically, these data report the actual time performers spent together on the stage or movie set, which I use as an indicator of collective skill formation. By exploiting the discrepancy between time spent together and mere common presence in the credits of a movie or theater play, I am able to parse out the impact, on subsequent earnings and employment, of respectively reputation effects and collective skill formation - a feat rarely achieved in the literature on collaborations and careers. After adjusting for various controls, I show that collaborations with successful others positively impact subsequent career steps through a quality-signaling mechanism, or credits effect. Yet it is time spent with not-so-established others that lifts further earnings through a skill formation process, probably because these others are the ones that are able to impart fresh skills. Thus, the paper does not only show that collaborations matter for individual achievement: it also unpacks which collaborations matter, and how they do so. Dissolution and Re-Activation in Collaboration Networks Jimi Adams (University of Colorado Denver), Ryan Light (University of Oregon) Collaboration networks are frequently used to estimate characteristics of tie accumulation, relationship clustering, and network change/stability over time. Moreover, collaborations–along with citations and research content–often form the backbone(s) for interpreting field-level dynamics in a variety of applications, including: disciplinary trajectories, interdisciplinary dynamics, and team science. A key limitation in much of the prior collaboration network literature is that ties are simply assumed to accumulate over time (ignoring the ebbs and flows in those relationships), which treats all ties as perpetually manifest. This stands in contrast to recent theoretical developments for analyzing network dynamics, which have identified the important difference between dynamics of networks (how ties change overtime) versus dynamics on networks (how network change functions as an independent variable shaping other outcomes). This distinction has shaped methodological examination of network dynamics, in practice treating dynamics of networks independently from the dynamics on networks. Yet, collaboration ties are both the consequence of dynamic process and directly how influence networks change. As such, we need to formalize a framework to understand and predict collaboration network dynamics. Here, we therefore ask two specific sets of questions about collaboration ties. First, we ask what leads a collaborative relation- ship to dissolve. We describe the distribution of these collaborative dissolutions, and provide some initial estimates of their attribute- and homophily-based predictors (based on characteristics such as, gender, age, and institution prestige). This first set of questions leads to another key feature of collaboration networks–the latent potential for their subsequent re-activation from this dormant phase. Therefore, second we ask about this latent period, in a manner that parallels the first set of questions: we describe, then estimate initial predictors for this dormancy and reactivation process. Across both questions, we particularly focus on the differences between mentor/mentee relationships compared to other (less formalized) collaborative relationships. We examine these questions with data covering the years 1975-2003 which combines scientometric data from Sociological Abstracts with membership data from the American Sociological Association for 1,322 authors. From Social network to Social networth: Social Pricing model for emerging markets Tele- coms customers Olubayo Adekanmbi (City University, London) Pricing has been applied as a dynamic tool for competitiveness in the telecoms industry, especially in emerging market where revenue is threatened by higher share of low-income customers, macroeconomic pressure and high multisimming 2 (use of multiple SIMs for price arbitrage). Traditional pricing models are largely driven by cost and utility, with new trends like yield management and location-based discounts being applied to drive market penetration and profitability in the low income segment. Emerging market customers, especially those in West and Central Africa are collectivist societies where interpersonal ties define the organic solidarity of their communal culture. The nature of interactions between these social cliques and the ability to leverage these relational cliques to keep trigger telecoms services usage and sustain longer customers’ activity ratio using special preferential in-community tariff have been evaluated in this study. The social capital theory of the cumulative benefits that flow from the trust, reciprocity, information, and cooperation associated withsocial networks has been applied to build a social pricing framework; where dynamic, personalised and regressive pricing can be applied to stimulate customers to make additional calls to their social cliques based on the perceived value attached to the social network. This dynamic model of network-based social pricing is significantly different from the generic friends-and-family tariffing principles. This methodology seeks to provide an alternative to telecommunication operators’ profitability drive by combining the ability to sustain customers’ activity ratios via more frequent contact with their social ties at discounted rates (customer retention) and the dynamic ability to recommend further discounts for less-frequently called phone numbers within customers’ sphere of influence (unique list of previously called numbers in the last two years). In monetising the strength of the interactions and likely incremental spend, learning from Krackhardt’s “philo” relationship was applied to score the various relational bridges and social ties using Interaction (frequency of return calls and/or SMS exchange), Affection (average length of call compared to market average) and Time (recency and history of interaction counted in months). This scoring model was applied to develop a Call Recommender system to stimulate social calling at low-peak periods through a personalised USSD campaign interface (e.g. Call this friend’s number 1234 in the next one hour at 90% discount). After 6 months of targeted campaigns, 6% uplift in revenue was observed in a 50,120 sample used for this study compared to an untreated cohort. In the same vein, the churn or customer inactivity ratio in the treated group outperformed benchmark models significantly with a 31% positive difference between the treated and non-treated groups. This study has opened a new frontier in how telecommunication operators in emerging market can effectively oper- ationalise a dual strategy of customer retention and incremental revenue through social network optimisation and dynamic social pricing model, executed using legacy campaign management system. Biased-Net-type centrality measure(s): Using a probabilistic version of walks, trails and paths to specify central actors in a network Filip Agneessens (University of Surrey) Measures of individual centrality for an actor (i) in a network are often obtained by aggregating the connections between the focal actor (i) and all its direct and indirect connections to others (k) in this network. The level to which there is a connection between an actor (i) and others (k) will be dependent on the choice of trajectories that are allowed, i.e. the way resources from actor (i) can flow through the network in order to reach these others (k). Borgatti (2005) has focused on four such types of trajectories: walks, trails, paths and geodesics. Trails are specific types of walks were the same edge cannot be passed multiple times in a specific trajectory, whereas paths are specific types of trails where the same nodes cannot be passed multiple times in a specific trajectory. However, such restrictions do not have to be binary (i.e. the same edge or node can or cannot be passed), but instead can be probabilistic (i.e. it is less or more likely that the same edge or node is passed). Moreover these restrictions might be more or less relevant when the edge or node is revisited after a short versus long number of intermediary steps (resulting in more local versus more global restrictions). An approach based on Rapoport’s biased net procedure is used to model such restrictions. The impact of the choices of (levels of) restrictions for nodes in specific networks. Both situations where resources are duplicated and transferred (Borgatti, 2005) will be considered. Consumer Ties in Social Media Networks Duygu Akdevelioglu