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Does more connectivity help groups to solve social problems

Published: 05 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

A growing literature on human networks suggests that the way we are connected influences both individual and group outcomes. Recent experimental studies in the social and computer sciences have claimed that higher network connectivity helps individuals solve coordination problems. However, this is not always the case, especially when we consider complex coordination tasks; we demonstrate that networks can have both constraining edges that inhibit collective action and redundant edges that encourage it. We show that the constraints imposed by additional edges can impede coordination even though these edges also increase communication. By contrast, edges that do not impose additional constraints facilitate coordination, as described in previous work. We explain why the negative effect of constraint trumps the positive effect of communication by analyzing coordination games as a special case of widely-studied constraint satisfaction problems. The results help us to understand the importance of problem complexity and network connections, and how different types of connections can influence real-world coordination.

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cover image ACM Conferences
EC '11: Proceedings of the 12th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
June 2011
384 pages
ISBN:9781450302616
DOI:10.1145/1993574
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 05 June 2011

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Author Tags

  1. coordination
  2. game theory
  3. graph coloring
  4. human-subject experiments
  5. social network

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EC '11
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EC '11: ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
June 5 - 9, 2011
California, San Jose, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 664 of 2,389 submissions, 28%

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  • (2024)Adaptive networks driven by partner choice can facilitate coordination among humans in the graph coloring game: Evidence from a network experimentCollective Intelligence10.1177/263391372412859013:3Online publication date: 20-Sep-2024
  • (2023)The Computational Challenges of Means Selection Problems: Network Structure of Goal Systems Predicts Human PerformanceCognitive Science10.1111/cogs.1333047:8Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Structure in context: A morphological view of whole network performanceSocial Networks10.1016/j.socnet.2022.10.00272(165-182)Online publication date: Jan-2023
  • (2020)Cognition and communication: situational awareness and tie preservation in disrupted task environmentsNetwork Science10.1017/nws.2020.15(1-35)Online publication date: 11-May-2020
  • (2019)Social Network-Oriented Learning Agent for Improving Group Intelligence CoordinationIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.29494657(156526-156535)Online publication date: 2019
  • (2018)Procure, persist, perish: communication tie dynamics in a disrupted task environmentSocial Network Analysis and Mining10.1007/s13278-018-0514-18:1Online publication date: 30-May-2018
  • (2017)Organizational Tie (De)activation During CrisisProceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 201710.1145/3110025.3110032(123-130)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2017
  • (2016)An Instance of Distributed Social Computation: The Multiagent Group Membership ProblemIEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems10.1109/TCNS.2015.24536713:1(79-90)Online publication date: Mar-2016
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  • (2012)Experiments in social computationCommunications of the ACM10.1145/2347736.234775355:10(56-67)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2012
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