Firms are increasingly seeking to harness the potential of social networks for marketing purposes. Therefore, marketers are interested in understanding the antecedents and consequences of relationship formation within networks and in predicting interactivity among users. The authors develop an...

In this paper we test the celebrated `Strength of weak ties' theory of Granovetter (1973). We test two hypotheses on the network structure in a data set of collaborating economists. While we find support for the hypothesis of transitivity of strong ties, we reject the hypothesis that weak ties...

We develop and analyze a tractable empirical model for strategic network formation that can be estimated with data from a single network at a single point in time. We model the network formation as a sequential process where in each period a single randomly selected pair of agents has the...