Capital and benefit in social networks

Recently there has been a surge of interest in social networks. Email traffic, disease transmission, and criminal activity can all be modeled as social networks. In this paper, we introduce a particular form of social network which we call a friendship-event network. A friendship-event network describes two inter-related networks. One is a friendship network among a set of actors. The other is an event network that describes events, event organizers and event participants. Within these types of networks, we formulate the notion of capital based on the actor-organizer friendship relationship and the notion of benefit, based on event participation. We ground these definitions in a real-world example of academic collaboration networks, where the actors are researchers, the friendships are collaborations, the events are conferences, the organizers are program committee members and the participants are conference authors. We incorporate a temporal component by considering the notion of an event series. We explore the use of these measures on a data set describing three computer science conferences over the past ten years.