A social network analysis of internally displaced communities in northeast Nigeria: potential conflicts with host communities in the Lake Chad region

In this study, we aim to analyze social networks in which internally displaced persons (IDPs) are involved in northeast Nigeria, after they have been displaced by the insurgency of the Boko Haram group. While IDPs usually resettle in camps operated by the government, contacts with host communities are common. We further analyze the potential that such contacts may lead to conflicts between IDPs and their host communities in the Lake Chad region. Data for this study were collected by interviewing IDPs in the Bakassi IDP camp in Maiduguri and by interviewing members of the host community in Maiduguri in close proximity to the Bakassi IDP camp. A Social Network Analysis approach was used to analyze the data, by constructing social network graphs and computing network attributes, mainly the betweenness centrality of actors. The results of the study show on the one hand a mixture of friendly and conflicting relationships between IDPs and the host community from the IDPs’ perspective, and on the other hand, only few contacts between members of the host community and IDPs in the Bakassi IDP camp, from the host community's perspective. The analysis suggests that in the context of conflict present in the Lake Chad region, IDPs and members of the host community mainly use closed networks, to keep available resources and economic opportunities within their communities. We recommend a better service delivery to IDPs but also to members of the host communities who feel neglected as more attention is given to IDPs with the distribution of humanitarian aid.

ALGORITHM FOR IDENTIFYING GRAPH OF CLOSED TRANSACTIONS BETWEEN ECONOMIC AGENTS

The article considers developing the algorithm of local economic communities’ identification on the municipal union territory. The description of authors’ algorithm is presented. The algorithm was tested on the real object of research. Searching of local entrepreneurs’ communities was conducted in the city with population of 59,000 citizens. The analyses were made according to sampling of 12, 000 transactions between 2 933 organizations during one month in 4 bank branches. There were found 17 closed networks with 102 organization-participants. The largest network of agents consists of 59 organizations-participants. The comparison of the largest network with random graphs (Bernoulli, Multinomial) showed that the structure is formed not randomly

Policy Question: How Can Competition against the Tech Giants Be Fostered?

In the United States, monopoly is often tolerated if the profits are used to create or reward innovation and enhanced customer service. However, where a lack of competition harms the consumer, the government is empowered to step in, and even break companies up, using antitrust law. The tech giants have pushed against these limits, being immensely innovative, but at the cost of creating giant, powerful, and (often) highly profitable closed networks. The chapter considers the difficulties in remedying these problems, as breaking up a large network will lose its network effects and positive externalities. Other possibilities include preventing acquisitions, and forcing divestment of some units. However, if the conditions allowing the network effects to build up are not addressed, new firms may become just as large. The European Union is actively looking at competition law in the tech industry, and by late 2020, so was the Trump administration.

The Third Internet: The DC Commercial Internet

This chapter describes the DC Commercial Internet. The ideal consists of economic liberty, market solutions to resource allocation problems, property rights over the Internet, and exploitation of positive externalities. The exemplar is the United States, especially its Supreme Court, which has judged networks as private spaces (‘walled gardens’) which can and should be monetized as their owners prefer. Such an approach, it is argued, will lead to greater innovation and value creation for the public, even at the cost of interoperability and net neutrality. Social networks have gained from this view, able to create closed networks within walled gardens benefiting from network effects to collect data about members. Facebook has offered free services in the developing world in order to bring more people online within its boundaries. An attempt to sell the .org domain to a private equity company, however, foundered. This model has been called ‘surveillance capitalism’.

Cooperation Beyond the Network

It is well known in economics, law, and sociology that reputation costs in a closed network give insiders a feeling of being protected from bad behavior in their relations with one another. A person accustomed to doing business within a closed network is, therefore, likely to feel at unusual risk when asked to cooperate beyond the network because of absent reputation-cost security. It follows that business leaders in more closed networks should be less likely to cooperate beyond their network (Hypothesis 1 ). Success reinforces the status quo. Business leaders successful with a closed network associate their success with the safety of their network, so they should be even less likely to cooperate with a stranger (Hypothesis 2 ). We combine network data from a heterogeneous area probability survey of Chinese CEOs with a behavioral measure of cooperation to show strong empirical support for the two hypotheses. CEOs in more closed networks are less likely to cooperate beyond their network, especially those running successful businesses: successful CEOs in closed networks are particularly likely to defect against people beyond their network. The work contributes to a growing literature linking network structure with behavior: here, the closure that facilitates trust and cooperation within a network simultaneously erodes the probability of cooperation beyond the network, thereby reinforcing a social boundary around the network. Taking our results as a baseline, we close sketching new research on personality, homophily, network dynamics, and variation in the meaning of “beyond the network.”

Pass-and-swap queues

Order-independent (OI) queues, introduced by Berezner et al. (Queueing Syst 19(4):345–359, 1995), expanded the family of multi-class queues that are known to have a product-form stationary distribution by allowing for intricate class-dependent service rates. This paper further broadens this family by introducing pass-and-swap (P&S) queues, an extension of OI queues where, upon a service completion, the customer that completes service is not necessarily the one that leaves the system. More precisely, we supplement the OI queue model with an undirected graph on the customer classes, which we call a swapping graph, such that there is an edge between two classes if customers of these classes can be swapped with one another. When a customer completes service, it passes over customers in the remainder of the queue until it finds a customer it can swap positions with, that is, a customer whose class is a neighbor in the graph. In its turn, the customer that is ejected from its position takes the position of the next customer it can be swapped with, and so on. This is repeated until a customer can no longer find another customer to be swapped with; this customer is the one that leaves the queue. After proving that P&S queues have a product-form stationary distribution, we derive a necessary and sufficient stability condition for (open networks of) P&S queues that also applies to OI queues. We then study irreducibility properties of closed networks of P&S queues and derive the corresponding product-form stationary distribution. Lastly, we demonstrate that closed networks of P&S queues can be applied to describe the dynamics of new and existing load-distribution and scheduling protocols in clusters of machines in which jobs have assignment constraints.

Social network characteristics and alcohol use by ethnic origin: An ego-based network study on peer similarity, social relationships, and co-existing drinking habits among young Swedes

The study explores how social network determinants relate to the prevalence and frequency of alcohol use among peer dyads. It is studied how similar alcohol habits co-exist among persons (egos) and their peers (alters) when socio-demographic similarity (e.g., in ethnic origin), network composition and other socio-cultural aspects were considered. Data was ego-based responses derived from a Swedish national survey with a cohort of 23-year olds. The analytical sample included 7987 ego-alter pairs, which corresponds to 2071 individuals (egos). A so-called dyadic design was applied i.e., all components of the analysis refer to ego-alter pairs (dyads). Multilevel multinomial-models were used to analyse similarity in alcohol habits in relation to ego-alter similarity in ethnic background, religious beliefs, age, sex, risk-taking, educational level, closure in network, duration, and type of relationship, as well as interactions between ethnicity and central network characteristics. Ego-alter similarity in terms of ethnic origin, age and sex was associated with ego-alter similarity in alcohol use. That both ego and alters were non-religious and were members of closed networks also had an impact on similarity in alcohol habits. It was concluded that network similarity might be an explanation for the co-existence of alcohol use among members of peer networks.

Network Capabilities: Brokerage as a Bridge Between Network Theory and the Resource-Based View of the Firm

We accomplish three tasks here: (a) We highlight the lack of cross-fertilization between research on network theory and the resource-based view of the firm (RBV). (b) We sketch by analogy what we believe should be a productive bridge between network brokerage as a core concept in network theory and integrating resources as a core concept in RBV. (c) Network brokerage quickly introduced, we distinguish and illustrate three levels to the proposed network-RBV analogy: tight integration of resources (closed networks for learning-curve efficiency), loose integration of resources (brokered clusters for resilience to market vicissitudes), and recombinatory integration of resources (broker leadership for innovation and robust response to market shock).

Steady air flow model for large sewer networks: a theoretical framework

Modelling air movement in sewer networks is needed in order to address the issues related to sewer odour complaints and sewer corrosions due to hydrogen sulphide in sewers. Most of the existing air flow models can only be applied in small sewer networks or the trunk lines of sewer systems. The purpose of this paper is therefore to propose a theoretical approach to formulate a general governing equation set for modelling steady air movement in large sewer systems. This approach decomposes the sewer system of interest into its basic physical components as pipes and nodes, and builds local topology of each pipe and each node based on geographic information system data as the fundamentals of model formulation. It avoids manually identifying each branch of the sewer system, eliminates the effect of physically closed networks in sewer systems on the governing equations, and considers key sewer components and all known driving forces. The proposed approach was applied to a real sewer system with over 500 pipes. The results show that the proposed model is applicable in modelling air movement in a large sewer system and provides a general idea of sewer gases moving through the system and their emission.