arXiv subjects

Katharine A. Anderson

Publications and source records attributed to Katharine A. Anderson.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2016

Group formation with network constraints

Group formation is important in many economic contexts. The current literature on group formation assumes that individuals may join any existing group. In this paper, I consider the implications of social, geographic, and informational constraints to group membership decisions. I embed the players in a network of relationships, which constrains their choice of groups--they may only join a group if that group contains a member that they are connected to on the network. I then examine how this network constraint affects the equilibrium group structure. I show that even with complete information, unconstrained individuals form groups that are inefficiently large. When individuals are constrained, the resulting group structures are much closer to the socially optimal group structure, because the constraint limits the ability of the individual to free ride on the efforts of other group members. The efficiency of the outcome is related to the structure of the network constraint--outcomes are more efficient when networks are sparse and have few random connections.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2016

Specialists and Generalists: Equilibrium Skill Acquisition Decisions in Problem-solving Populations

Many organizations rely on the skills of innovative individuals to create value, including academic and government institutions, think tanks, and knowledge-based firms. Roughly speaking, workers in these fields can be divided into two categories: specialists, who have a deep knowledge of a single area, and generalists, who have knowledge in a wide variety of areas. In this paper, I examine an individual's choice to be a specialist or generalist. My model addresses two questions: first, under what conditions does it make sense for an individual to acquire skills in multiple areas, and second, are the decisions made by individuals optimal from an organizational perspective? I find that when problems are single-dimensional, and disciplinary boundaries are open, all workers will specialize. However, when there are barriers to working on problems in other fields, then there is a tradeoff between the depth of the specialist and the wider scope of problems the generalist has available. When problems are simple, having a wide variety of problems makes it is rational to be a generalist. As these problems become more difficult, though, depth wins out over scope, and workers again tend to specialize. However, that decision is not necessarily socially optimal--on a societal level, we would prefer that some workers remain generalists.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2016

A Model of Collaboration Network Formation with Heterogenous Skills

Collaboration networks provide a method for examining the highly heterogeneous structure of collaborative communities. However, we still have limited theoretical understanding of how individual heterogeneity relates to network heterogeneity. The model presented here provides a framework linking an individual's skill set to her position in the collaboration network, and the distribution of skills in the population to the structure of the collaboration network as a whole. This model suggests that there is a non-trivial relationship between skills and network position: individuals with a useful combination of skills will have a disproportionate number of links in the network. Indeed, in some cases, an individual's degree is non-monotonic in the number of skills she has--an individual with very few skills may outperform an individual with many. Special cases of the model suggest that the degree distribution of the network will be skewed, even when the distribution of skills is uniform in the population. The degree distribution becomes more skewed as problems become more difficult, leading to a community dominated by a few high-degree superstars. This has striking implications for labor market outcomes in industries where production is largely the result of collaborative effort.

physics.soc-ph↗