Directed or Undirected? A New Index to Check for Directionality of Relations in Socio-Economic Networks

Giorgio Fagiolo ()

Economics Bulletin, 2006, vol. 3, issue 34, 1-12

Abstract: 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.

JEL-codes: C1 C6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-12-29
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.accessecon.com/pubs/EB/2006/Volume3/EB-06Z10134A.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-06z10134

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economics Bulletin from AccessEcon
Bibliographic data for series maintained by John P. Conley ().