Customer Reviews

Social and Economic Networks

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Jackson has really produced a wonderfully cogent book with an economic approach to studying networks. To be clear, the book is aimed at readers with a degree of mathematical sophistication. He examines how (cooperative and non-cooperative) game theory can be applied to networks, i.e. models of friendship between individuals, alliances between firms and other similar situations. The empirical analysis of networks is treated in a couple of chapters, but perhaps deserves a separate book. Overall, this is an ideal place to start for someone interested in developing microeconomic and game-theoretic models of network interactions.

This book is a very useful approach to the social and economic networks by an interesting mathematical view. The exposition is no very difficult as calculations, if one knows sufficiently the game theory. This method is a mix by the Statistics and the Graph theory, while a significative role is related to the Bayes formula. This theory depends in large part by the game theory, let be cooperative or not-cooperative. The applications are about the biology, next the sociology and the economics.

Jackson offers a deeper understanding of Web 2.0, the social web. There has been much buzz of Web 2.0 in this decade, as the successor to the dot coms. Indeed, the rise of Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and others has been spectacular. What this book offers are models of social relationships, that can be used with possible profitable results.

Try using the models to gauge some ideas as the existence and size distributions of clusters within a network. As well as finding key players within the network. Nor should you confine yourself to only those models offered in the text. What the book offers is also in some meta-modelling sense how to develop your own models and assess these against your networks.

Be warned that the book could be too mathematical for some readers. The treatment is sophisticated, and does not lend easily to a trivial read.