#  Van Alstyne on "Network Structure and Information Advantage" 

 





September 21, 2009

 

 

Please join us this Wednesday, September 23rd at the [Applied Statistics Workshop](http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k64817) when we will be fortunate to have [Marshall Van Alstyne](http://web.mit.edu/marshall/www/home.html) presenting ["Network Structure and Information Advantage: The Diversity--Bandwidth Tradeoff."](http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic646669.files/Diversity_vs_Bandwidth-AVA.pdf) Marshall is an Associate Professor at Boston University in the Department of Management Information Systems as well as Research Associate at MIT's [Center for E-Business](http://ebusiness.mit.edu/). Marshall passed along the following abstract:

> To get novel information, we propose that actors in brokerage positions face a tradeoff between network diversity and communication channel bandwidth. As the structural diversity of a network increases, the bandwidth of communication channels in that network decreases, creating countervailing effects on the receipt of novel information. This argument is based on the observation that diverse networks are typically made up of weaker ties, characterized by narrower communication channels across which less diverse information is likely to flow. The diversity-bandwidth tradeoff is moderated by (a) the degree to which topics are uniformly or heterogeneously distributed over the alters in a broker's network, (b) the dimensionality of the information in a broker's network (whether the total number of topics communicated by alters is large or small) and (c) the rate at which the information possessed by a broker's contacts refreshes or changes over time. We test this theory by combining social network and performance data with direct observation of information content flowing through email channels at a medium sized executive recruiting firm. These analyses unpack the mechanisms that enable information advantages in networks and serve as a 'proof-of-concept' for using email content data to analyze relationships among information flows, networks, and social capital.

A copy of the [paper](http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic646669.files/Diversity_vs_Bandwidth-AVA.pdf) is also available.

The Applied Statistics workshop meets each Wednesday in room K-354, CGIS-Knafel (1737 Cambridge St). We start at 12 noon with a light lunch, with presentations beginning around 12:15 and we usually wrap up around 1:30 pm. We hope you can make it.

Posted by [Matt Blackwell](http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/author/matt-blackwell/) at September 21, 2009 10:26 AM



 

 

 



 

 

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