Abstract
Research shows that individuals benefit from setting up their personal networks strategically. There are two fundamental networking approaches: structural change, which involves the addition and deletion of communication ties, and frequency change, which means an increase or decrease of communication on existing ties. Existing literature has focused predominantly on structural change, leaving the potential of frequency change understudied. To investigate the differential effects of structural and frequency change on the efficiency of information flow through a network, we conduct simulations of networking approaches on a diverse set of real-world directed weighted communication networks. Our results indicate that, overall, frequency change is associated with higher efficiency than structural change in all but one of the studied cases. Structural change has a strong direct effect on individuals who actively modify their personal network. Surprisingly, our simulations also show that the indirect effects of frequency change (i.e., an individual’s ties are reshaped due to others’ actions) can exceed direct ones. Our results highlight the value of the so far less studied frequency change and suggest that using targeted network alterations can result in gains for information flow at the scale of the entire network.
Highlights
Individuals communicate with each other strategically to improve access to information and to capitalize on social contacts in attaining personal and professional goals
We study how various networking approaches impact the efficiency of communication networks
In the denser than the least connected network (DNC) network, efficiency decreases in the presence of edge deletion and increases most through strengthening connections
Summary
Individuals communicate with each other strategically to improve access to information and to capitalize on social contacts in attaining personal and professional goals. Research in network science has studied in detail how the structure of socio-technological networks impacts human behavior (Barabási 2016; Borgatti et al 2009; Newman 2003; Watts and Strogatz 1998). This perspective establishes that individuals’ structural position predetermines their opportunities (Giddens 1984), but does not address people’s ability to shape their own network to better fit individual and group needs. Engel et al 2017; Hallen and Eisenhardt 2012; Vissa 2012) This line of research defines networking as individuals’ proactive and purposeful action to communicate with their social contacts (Kuwabara et al 2018). We study how various networking approaches impact the efficiency of communication networks
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