Statistical Equilibrium Models for Sparse Economic Networks

Real markets can be naturally represented as networks, and they share with other social networks the fundamental property of sparsity, whereby agents are connected by l = O (n) relationships. The exponential networks model introduced by Park and Newman can be extended in order to deal with this property. When compared with alternative statistical models of a given real network, this extended model provides a better statistical justification for the observed network values. Consequently, it provides more reliable maximum entropy estimates of partially known networks than previously known ME techniques.