About the approach to measure company’s network capital

Abstract

In modern scientific literature the category of «capital» is beginning to be applied to a wide range of company assets that can bring economic benefits over a long period of time. Various researchers distinguish human, intellectual, social, network and other types of capital. This makes it urgent to develop new approaches to assessing various types of capital, taking into account their complementary specificity. Within the framework of this article the task is to propose a new approach to measure company’s network capital. Existing methods for estimating company’s value are often based on summing up the costs of individual types of capital. However, such an additive approach does not consider the complementary nature of different types of capital. The work proposes to use a multiplicative approach based on the modified Cobb–Douglas function, which takes into account property and network capital as well as the economic efficiency of the company. This approach takes into account the complementarity of different types of capital and their combined impact on the value of а company. Seven leading global companies in the IT industry (Microsoft, Apple, Oracle Corp., Alphabet, Baidu, Meta, Twitter) were chosen as the empirical basis for the study. The proposed approach made possible to compare the network capital of different companies and identify the factors influencing its accumulation.