The focus of this study is on black markets which provide an important segment of the parallel economy. These markets operate in disequilibrium,search and information costs become very important.Trafficking in drugs taken as case, to explore both theoretically and empirically. The problem,...

The paper discusses opportunities to utilize the series of micro-blogs as provided by the Twitter in observation of opinion dynamics. The spontaneity of tweets is more, as the service is attached more to the mobile communications. The extraction of information in the series of tweets is...

Social networks can be differentiated according to the type of entities (i.e., humans or objects) that are represented within them. These networks can be called human networks and social object networks, respectively. Actors in human networks can act strategically to maximize their own payoffs...

The power of using knowledge against competitors is a key success factor in the information age. However, the knowledge itself is not the source of competitive advantage for an organization; rather its power lies in its use. In a learning organization, collective knowledge of the individuals is...

People-to-people interactions in the real world and in virtual environments (e.g., Facebook) can be represented through complex networks. Changes of the structural properties of these complex networks are caused through a variety of dynamic processes. While accepting the fact that variability in...

Service providers that own Web2.0 services allow Internet users not only to access their Web2.0 services but also to create new Web2.0 services (mashups) based on theirs. This creation of mashups generates the Web2.0 service network, in which a node represents a Web2.0 service and a link between...

In this paper, we connect the social network theory on centrality measures to the economic theory of preferences and utility. Using the fact that networks form a special class of cooperative TU-games, we provide a foundation for the degree measure as a von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility...

Banks remain the most important credit source globally despite large-scale financial development. However, banking continues to be plagued by rising costs and information asymmetry. In this context, we show how an additional borrower characteristic, specifically the borrower's network strength,...

We develop a modelling framework for estimating and predicting weighted network data. The edge weights in weighted networks often arise from aggregating some individual relationships between the nodes. Motivated by this, we introduce a modelling framework for weighted networks based on the...

Trust and trust management represent the very foundations of Computer and Network Security Protocols enabling all cyber activities. The recent spate of national and global high-impact cyber security compromises threats, vulnerabilities and exposures leads to fundamental questioning of trust as...