Course 2024-2025 a.y.

The following topics will be discussed.

1. 1. Graphs: definitions and measures – basic concepts:
      degree, distance, component, clustering, betweenness, etc.
   2. Types of networks: lattice, tree/hierarchic, random, etc.
   3. Some real-world examples: a glimpse into its wide diversity
   4. Forces/mechanisms at work:
      1. Distance/geography
      2. Popularity
      3. Link strength and intermediation
      4. The social environment: homophily and socialization
      5. Positive and negative relationships: structural balance
   5. Diffusion and search in networks
      1. Epidemics: contagion processes in a large social networks
      2. Behavioral dynamics: frequency-dependent diffusion
      3. Search in a small world: walking the web
   6. Information networks: the World Wide Web (WWW)
      1.  Structure of the WWW
      2. Centralized search and learning: Web-filtering & semantic webs
      3. Decentralized learning in networks: de Groot model
   7. Networks and games: traffic, markets, and power
      1. Traffic and congestion in networks
      2. Matching and markets
      3. Intermediation in markets
      4. Bargaining and power in networks

The student should become familiar and competent with the basic concepts and tools of Network Science, as it is applied too social and economic environments. Notions of centrality, clustering, search, or social distance provide the framework to think about networked contexts in such environments.

The knowledge gathered as described above will be applied to a plethora of socio-economic phenomena: epidemics, diffusion, matching, traffic and congestion, or bargaining. These application should be useful for students to understand some of the social and economic contexts

• Lectures
• Practical Exercises
• Individual works / Assignments
• Interaction/Gamification

My teaching will be based on detailed and self-contained presentation of the material, with the support of slides. Throughout the course, the students will have to complete “problem sets” in order to fix and apply the contents being covered in the course.

The assessment of the students’ progress will emphasize the need to put the learned concepts, tools, and procedures to shed light on important real-world phenomena such as how information is (or can be) gathered, how labor markets work, how can a government minimize the effect of epidemics, how traffic can be routed efficiently, or how bargaining is affected by position of power in social networks. This will be done in terms of specific cases taken from the real world as well as stylized frameworks that model real-world situations.

The assessment methods used in the course are marked below among those provided in the list.

• The main textbook will be Networks, Crowds, and Markets,  by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Pre-print copy available at
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/

For a more technical coverage of some of the topics, the following two auxiliary books can be used:

• Complex Social Networks,  by Fernando Vega-Redondo, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Social and Economic Networks,  by Mathew Jackson, Princeton University Press, 2008.