What (Exactly) is Novelty in Networks? Unpacking the Vision Advantages of Brokers, Bridges, and Weak Ties.

43 Pages Posted: 1 Feb 2014 Last revised: 6 Oct 2021

See all articles by Sinan Aral

Sinan Aral

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management

Paramveer Dhillon

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Date Written: October 5, 2021

Abstract

The Strength of Weak Ties and Brokerage Theory both rely on the argument that weak bridging ties deliver novel information to create "vision advantages" for actors in brokerage positions. But our conceptualization of novelty is itself fundamentally underdeveloped. We, therefore, develop a theory of how three distinct types of novelty -- diversity, non-redundancy, and uniqueness -- combine with network structure to create vision advantages in social networks. We test this theory using panel data on an evolving corporate email network. Three main results emerge from our analysis. First, we confirm the Diversity-Bandwidth Tradeoff (DBT) at the heart of the vision advantage. As brokers' networks become more diverse, their channel bandwidth contracts, creating countervailing effects on access to novel information. Second, we uncover a mechanism driving the DBT, which helps explain differences in vision advantages across strong and weak ties. Strong, cohesive ties deliver greater information diversity and non-redundancy, while weak bridging ties contribute the most unique information (the information that is most different from what other contacts deliver). Third, we find network diversity (in contrast to network constraint) to be positively associated with longitudinal entropy, a measure of the accumulation of novel information over time. This suggests that weak bridging ties, which provide the most unique information through low bandwidth, structurally diverse channels, contribute the most to one's aggregation of novel information over time. Collectively, these results take a step towards resolving a long-standing debate in network theory about whether strong, cohesive networks or weak bridging networks contribute more to vision advantages. This work establishes firmly that it depends.

Keywords: Networks, Information Exchange, Information Channels, Information Flow, Knowledge Transfer, Content Analysis, Text Mining.

Suggested Citation

Aral, Sinan and Dhillon, Paramveer, What (Exactly) is Novelty in Networks? Unpacking the Vision Advantages of Brokers, Bridges, and Weak Ties. (October 5, 2021). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2388254 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2388254

Sinan Aral (Contact Author)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management ( email )

100 Main Street
E62-416
Cambridge, MA 02142
United States

Paramveer Dhillon

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor ( email )

2350 Hayward Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
United States

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