|Talks|

Functional Structure in Production Networks

In-person
Visiting speaker
Past Talk
Carolina Mattsson
Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Lieden University
Sep 10, 2021
10:00 am
Sep 10, 2021
10:00 am
In-person
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK

Talk recording

Production networks are integral to economic dynamics, yet dis-aggregated network data on inter-firm trade is rarely collected and often proprietary. Here we situate company-level production networks within a wider space of networks that are different in nature, but similar in local connectivity structure. Through this lens, we study a regional and a national network of inferred trade relationships reconstructed from Dutch national economic statistics and re-interpret prior empirical findings. We find that company-level production networks have so-called functional structure, as previously identified in protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. Functional networks are distinctive in their over-representation of closed squares, which we quantify using an existing measure called spectral bipartivity. Shared local connectivity structure lets us ferry insights between domains. PPI networks are shaped by complementarity, rather than homophily, and we use multi-layer directed configuration models to show that this principle explains the emergence of functional structure in production networks. Companies are especially similar to their close competitors, not to their trading partners. Our findings have practical implications for the analysis of production networks and give us precise terms for the local structural features that may be key to understanding their routine function, failure, and growth.

About the speaker
Carolina has a PhD in Network Science and is currently a postdoc at LIACS (Leiden University). Her work advances our understanding of real-world walk processes on networks, the structure of production networks, transaction data from payment systems, and methods in computational social science. Aspects of this research are explicitly policy- or industry- facing, with projects alongside the Dutch Ministry of Economics and Climate, Statistics Netherlands, International Monetary Fund, Microfinance Opportunities, and Telenor Research. While at the Network Science Institute (Northeastern University), Carolina was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and an NSF INTERN.
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Sep 10, 2021