With the rapid development of information, communication and techniques, social network group decision making problems which allow information exchange and communication among experts are more and ...more common in recent years. How to use social relationships generated by social networks to promote consensus among experts has been becoming a hot topic in the field of group decision making. In this paper, we consider a new type of group decision making problems in which experts will provide his/her interval fuzzy preference relations over alternatives under social network environment and propose a new model to help experts reach consensus. In the proposed model, we first define the individual consensus measure and the group consensus measure, and then use a network partition algorithm to detect sub-networks of experts, based on which the leadership of experts can be identified. Afterwards, by considering the leadership and the bounded confidence levels of experts, a new feedback mechanism which can provide acceptable advice to experts who need to modify their opinions is devised and a consensus reaching algorithm is further developed. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed consensus model and algorithm, a hypothetical application and some simulation analysis are provided eventually.
The delivery of green buildings, as a good approach for reducing energy consumption, has yielded lots of innovative outcomes. The need to spark effective innovations has become crucial. Yet, there ...has been no systematic examination of the green buildings field. This study provides a novel network-based and longitudinal perspective for examining the innovative collaboration of different types of organizations. Secondary data were collected from 223 projects receiving Green Building Innovation Awards (GBIA) in China. By using the social network analysis (SNA) method, the following results were obtained. First, collaborative networks of green-building innovation exhibit a salient feature of being scale-free, indicating a trend of path dependence in partner selections. Second, compared with the degree and closeness centrality, the betweenness centrality of those core organizations is growing faster over time. Unexpectedly, consulting enterprises, rather than design institutes or universities, are inclined to act as “bridges” during the innovative collaboration process. Thirdly, the average number of collaborations per GBIA organization is similar to that of theoretical disciplines (e.g., mathematics) but lower than that of experimental disciplines (e.g., medicine). With decreases in transitivity over time, the heterogeneity of networks has increased and the connections among different organizations are relying more on a few key enterprises or institutions. On this basis, a policy framework is presented that incorporates four governance strategies: “deactivation,” “framing,” “mobilizing,” and “synthesizing.” The findings shed new light on the development of innovation networks and the alignment of strategic decision-makings to facilitate the transformation of energy consumption in the built environment.
•Secondary data were collected from Green Building Innovation Awards in China.•Green-building innovation networks exhibit a salient feature of being scale-free.•Consulting enterprises are inclined to act as “bridges” in the innovation network.•A policy framework is developed incorporating four types of strategies.
The growth of online learning environments entails understanding of how to promote collaborative knowledge construction processes and create learning environments that support meaningful student ...engagement and interactions. Asynchronous online discussion forums are intended to support knowledge construction and higher-order thinking and are becoming even more appealing for their predictive relationship with learning. This paper describes a study that explored the complex dynamics of knowledge construction in pre-service teacher education through examining student teachers' cognitive presence in online discussion forums and their academic performance. The results of multiple regression analysis showed that certain levels of cognitive presence were associated with students' academic performance. In addition, network analysis of discussion forums revealed that student centrality within their learning networks moderated the association between the highest level of cognitive presence and academic performance. The paper concludes with discussing the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.
•Online discourse reflects the level of cognitive engagement in teacher education courses.•Engagement in integration and resolution significantly predicts academic performance.•Centrality moderates the relationship between resolution and learner academic performance.•Analysis of learner interactions enhances understanding of knowledge building.
Credit scoring is without a doubt one of the oldest applications of analytics. In recent years, a multitude of sophisticated classification techniques have been developed to improve the statistical ...performance of credit scoring models. Instead of focusing on the techniques themselves, this paper leverages alternative data sources to enhance both statistical and economic model performance. The study demonstrates how including call networks, in the context of positive credit information, as a new Big Data source has added value in terms of profit by applying a profit measure and profit-based feature selection. A unique combination of datasets, including call-detail records, credit and debit account information of customers is used to create scorecards for credit card applicants. Call-detail records are used to build call networks and advanced social network analytics techniques are applied to propagate influence from prior defaulters throughout the network to produce influence scores. The results show that combining call-detail records with traditional data in credit scoring models significantly increases their performance when measured in AUC. In terms of profit, the best model is the one built with only calling behavior features. In addition, the calling behavior features are the most predictive in other models, both in terms of statistical and economic performance. The results have an impact in terms of ethical use of call-detail records, regulatory implications, financial inclusion, as well as data sharing and privacy.
•A novel approach for credit scoring using mobile phone data and social networks.•Implies enhanced financial inclusion in the context of positive credit information.•Incorporating mobile phone data increases statistical performance.•The best model in terms of profit includes only calling behavior features.•Individual calling behavior is most predictive of creditworthiness.
Leveraging social network trust relationships among experts to reach consensus has become a popular topic in linguistic group decision making (GDM). However, in linguistic contexts, it is commonly ...accepted that words mean different things for different people, which indicates the necessity of modeling experts' personalized individual semantics (PISs). Moreover, experts sometimes may show non-cooperative behaviors during the consensus reaching process (CRP) due to their own interests. As a result, this paper focuses on developing a consensus reaching algorithm with non-cooperative behavior management for PIS-based social network GDM problems. First, linguistic preference relations are transformed into fuzzy preference relations by the PIS model, and then social network analysis techniques are used to obtain experts' weight vector. Afterwards, we propose a feedback adjustment mechanism to improve experts' adjustment willingness in CPRs, in which the trust relationships and the PISs of experts are utilized to generate adjustment advice for experts. Furthermore, a non-cooperative behavior management mechanism which dynamically adjusts the trust degrees in social network is devised. Followed by this, a numerical example is provided to demonstrate the proposed algorithm. Finally, detailed simulation results are presented to analyze the influence of different parameters on CRPs and illustrate the validity of the proposed algorithm.
Social Networks and Cognition Smith, Edward Bishop; Brands, Raina A; Brashears, Matthew E ...
Annual review of sociology,
07/2020, Letnik:
46, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Social network analysis, now often thought of simply as network science, has penetrated nearly every scientific and many scholarly fields and has become an indispensable resource. Yet, social ...networks are special by virtue of being specifically social, and our growing understanding of the brain is affecting our understanding of how social networks form, mature, and are exploited by their members. We discuss the expanding research on how the brain manages social information, how this information is heuristically processed, and how network cognitions are affected by situation and circumstance. In the process, we argue that the cognitive turn in social networks exemplifies the modern conception of the brain as fundamentally reprogrammable by experience and circumstance. Far from social networks being dependent upon the brain, we anticipate a modern view in which cognition and social networks coconstitute each other.
Rational allocation of carbon quotas is the fundamental premise for the orderly operation of carbon markets. To achieve the set target of carbon peak by 2030, there is an urgent need to establish ...China's 2030 provincial carbon quota allocation scheme. Although some proposed schemes have been formulated, there are problems with the methods used for carbon emission forecasting and evaluating the rationality of a proposed allocation scheme. This study aimed to optimize carbon emission forecast by incorporating terrestrial carbon sinks into the mechanism for building China's 2030 provincial carbon emission quota allocation schemes. Aquila Optimizer's Double Support Vector Regression (AO-based TWSVR) that has the advantages in solving problems associated with small sample size, nonlinear and high-dimensional pattern recognition with fast training speed and insensitivity to noise was adopted to predict the net carbon emission. The results show that the application of AO-based TWSVR model allows satisfactory forecast of the net carbon emission in China for the period from 2021 to 2035. This allowed terrestrial carbon sequestration being incorporated into the mechanism to formulate China's 2030 provincial carbon quota allocation schemes. Comparison of the three provincial carbon quota allocation schemes using social network analysis suggests that the equity-based carbon quota allocation scheme is more suitable for China's national conditions compared to the efficiency-based scheme and the combined principle-based scheme. The findings obtained from this study have implications for optimizing the scheme of China's 2030 provincial carbon quota allocation.
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•AO-based TWSVR model was used to optimize carbon emission forecasting in China.•This allows satisfactory forecast of the net carbon emission from 2021 to 2035.•Three schemes were formulated for China’s 2030 provincial carbon quota allocation.•Social network analysis was used to evaluate the rationality of these schemes.•The equity-based scheme is more suitable for China's national conditions.
In many social situations, a discrepancy arises between an individual’s private and expressed opinions on a given topic. Motivated by Solomon Asch’s seminal experiments on social conformity and other ...related socio-psychological works, we propose a novel opinion dynamics model to study how such a discrepancy can arise in general social networks of interpersonal influence. Each individual in the network has both a private and an expressed opinion: an individual’s private opinion evolves under social influence from the expressed opinions of the individual’s neighbours, while the individual determines his or her expressed opinion under a pressure to conform to the average expressed opinion of his or her neighbours, termed the local public opinion. General conditions on the network that guarantee exponentially fast convergence of the opinions to a limit are obtained. Further analysis of the limit yields several semi-quantitative conclusions, which have insightful social interpretations, including the establishing of conditions that ensure every individual in the network has such a discrepancy. Last, we show the generality and validity of the model by using it to explain and predict the results of Solomon Asch’s seminal experiments.
This paper investigates how three aspects of governance systems, namely the policy context, the influence of key agents and their discursive practices, are affecting national-level processes of ...policy design aimed at REDD+, reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries; and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries. We conducted analysis in six REDD+ countries (Brazil, Cameroon, Indonesia, Nepal, Papua New Guinea and Vietnam). The paper combines three methods: policy analysis, media-based discourse analysis and policy network analysis. The paper shows that policies both within and outside the forestry sector that support deforestation and forest degradation create path dependencies and entrenched interests that hamper policy change. In addition, most dominant policy coalitions do not challenge business-as-usual trajectories, reinforcing existing policy and political structures. No minority policy coalitions are directly tackling the root causes of deforestation and forest degradation, that is, the politico-economic conditions driving them. Instead they focus on environmental justice issues, such as calls for increased participation of indigenous people in decision-making. Only in two of the six countries are these transformational change coalitions vocal enough to be heard, yet to exercise their agency effectively and to support more substantial reforms, these coalitions would need the participation of more influential policy actors, particularly state agencies that have the authority to make binding decisions about policy. Furthermore, discourses supporting transformational change would need to be reflected in institutional practices and policy decisions.
•The paper presents a quantitative method to assess power of discourse coalitions.•Discourses avoid direct drivers of deforestation but rather focus on equity issues.•Most dominant coalitions support business as usual deforestation trajectories.•Coalitions for change lack power of state actors to turn discourse into action.
Although many papers describe the evolution of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), most adopt a subjective approach. This paper examines the pattern of development of the AHP research field using ...social network analysis and scientometrics, and identifies its intellectual structure. The objectives are: (i) to trace the pattern of development of AHP research; (ii) to identify the patterns of collaboration among authors; (iii) to identify the most important papers underpinning the development of AHP; and (iv) to discover recent areas of interest. We analyse two types of networks: social networks, that is, co-authorship networks, and cognitive mapping or the network of disciplines affected by AHP. Our analyses are based on 8441 papers published between 1979 and 2017, retrieved from the ISI Web of Science database. To provide a longitudinal perspective on the pattern of evolution of AHP, we analyse these two types of networks during the three periods 1979-1990, 1991-2001 and 2002-2017. We provide some basic statistics on AHP journals and researchers, review the main topics and applications of integrated AHPs and provide direction for future research by highlighting some open questions.
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