Social media have great potential to support diverse information sharing, but there is widespread concern that platforms like Twitter do not result in communication between those who hold contradictory viewpoints. Because users can choose whom to follow, prior research suggests that social media...

Promoting contribution of content is a key challenge for platforms that support the collective creation or transfer of knowledge. We study the role of forum size (number of people in a forum) on contribution of content per person with a field experiment on a massive open online course (MOOC). We...

By leveraging information technologies, organizations now have the ability to design their communication networks and crowdsourcing platforms to pursue various performance goals, but existing research on network design does not account for the specific features of social networks, such as the...

Using data from a novel laboratory experiment on complex problem solving in which we varied the network structure of 16-person organizations, we investigate how an organization’s network structure shapes performance in problem-solving tasks. Problem solving, we argue, involves both search for...

What makes economic and ecological networks so unlike other highly skewed networks in their tendency toward turbulence and collapse? Here, we explore the consequences of a defining feature of these networks: their nodes are tied together by flow. We show that flow networks tend to the power law...

We introduce a new statistic, 'spectral goodness of fit' (SGOF) to measure how well a network model explains the structure of an observed network. SGOF provides an absolute measure of fit, analogous to the standard R-squared in linear regression. Additionally, as it takes advantage of the...