Difference between revisions of "Corporate Elite Networks and Governance Changes in the 1980s"

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== Summary ==
 
== Summary ==
  
This [[Category::paper]] analyzed the diffusion of two practices adopted by corporations in the United States during the 1980s, in order to deal with hostile takeovers.  
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This [[Category::paper]] analyzed the diffusion of two practices adopted by corporations in the United States during the 1980s, in order to deal with hostile takeovers. During a takeover, the initiators of the takeover will buy stocks of the targeting corporation from its shareholders at a high premium, in return for control of the corporation. During this process, the upper management suffers because they would lose their job, should the takeover succeeded.
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The "golden parachute" practice awards the management
  
 
== Discussion ==
 
== Discussion ==

Revision as of 21:51, 1 October 2012

Citation

Gerald F. David, Henrich R. Greve. Corporate Elite Networks and Governance Changes in the 1980s, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 103, No. 1. (Jul., 1997), pp. 1-37.

Online version

External link

Summary

This paper analyzed the diffusion of two practices adopted by corporations in the United States during the 1980s, in order to deal with hostile takeovers. During a takeover, the initiators of the takeover will buy stocks of the targeting corporation from its shareholders at a high premium, in return for control of the corporation. During this process, the upper management suffers because they would lose their job, should the takeover succeeded.

The "golden parachute" practice awards the management

Discussion

The authors clustered the fans of certain Facebook Page by connectivity (there's a friend path between any two fans in the same cluster), and claimed that in most clusters, 14% - 18% of the nodes (people) are chain initiators (they liked the Page by searching for it themselves). This percentage is much higher than what others have observed in other social norms. Also, The maximum length of a "like chain" is much longer than the word-of-mouth case, with 86.4% of the "like chains" have at least 4 nodes, and the longest chain being 82-node long. This may provide marketers some useful information when they decide where to put their ads next time.

What also contradicts with previous assumption is the property of decentralization. The diffusion of the like-a-Page action is not correlated with how active a user is or how many friends he/she has. The only controlling factor here is the likelihood of his/her like-a-Page action to appear on his/her friends' news feeds. Also, instead of starting from a small number of initiator nodes and spread out to their adjacent nodes, the global diffusion cascades starts with a large number of nodes who initiate short chains; each of those chains then quickly collide into a large single cluster.

Related Papers

  • Watts, D. J. and Dodds, P. S. 2007. Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation. Journal of Consumer Research 34: 441-58.
  • Leskovec, J. et al. 2007. Cascading Behavior in Large Blog Graphs. In SIAM International Conference on Data Mining.

Study Plan

You may first want to take a look at Binomial regression and Poisson regression.

Also, read the papers in the "Related Papers" section.