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| Giorgio Fagiolo |
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| ''Directed or Undirected? A New Index to Check for Directionality of Relations in Socio-Economic Networks'' |
| ( 2006, Vol. 3 No.34 ) |
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| This paper proposes a simple procedure to decide whether the empirically-observed adjacency or weights matrix, which characterizes the graph underlying a socio-economic network, is sufficiently symmetric (respectively, asymmetric) to justify an undirected (respectively, directed) network analysis. We introduce a new index that satisfies two main properties. First, it can be applied to both binary or weighted graphs. Second, once suitably standardized, it distributes as a standard normal over all possible adjacency/weights matrices. To test the index in practice, we present an application that employs a set of well-known empirically-observed social and economic networks. |
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| Keywords: |
JEL: C6 - Mathematical Methods and Programming: General
C1 - Econometric and Statistical Methods: General |
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| Manuscript Received : Dec 01 2006 | | Manuscript Accepted : Dec 29 2006 |
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