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...

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...