How to identify experts in a community?

Balázs Sziklai

International Journal of Game Theory, 2018, vol. 47, issue 1, No 6, 155-173

Abstract: Abstract The group identification literature mostly revolves around the problem of identifying individuals in the community who belong to ethnic or religious groups. Here we use the same model framework to identify individuals who play key role in some sense. In particular we will focus on expert selection in social networks. Ethnic groups and expert groups need completely different approaches and different type of selection rules are successful for one and for the other. We argue that stability is a key property in expert selection. The idea is that experts are more effective in identifying each other, thus the selected individuals should support each other’s membership. We propose a parametric algorithm based on the so called top candidate relation. The parameter expresses how permissive we want to be in expert selection. The two limit cases are the stable set and the top candidate core. The former contains virtually everybody that can be considered as an expert, while the latter consists of the elite. We establish an axiomatization to show that the algorithm is theoretically well-founded. Furthermore we present a case study using citation data to demonstrate its effectiveness. We compare its performance with classical centrality measures.

Keywords: Group identification; Expert selection; Stability; Citation analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00182-017-0582-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: On how to identify experts in a community (2015)
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:spr:jogath:v:47:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s00182-017-0582-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... eory/journal/182/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00182-017-0582-x

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Game Theory is currently edited by Shmuel Zamir, Vijay Krishna and Bernhard von Stengel

More articles in International Journal of Game Theory from Springer, Game Theory Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().