Models of dyadic and individual components of a social relation: Applications to international trade

A relation to one actor from another is conceived to be made up of a part which is their cultivation of the relationship to one from the other in particular and hence is a dyadic component termed the “particular relation” and a part which conforms to their pursuit of relations with actors in general and therefore is determined by individual components, namely the recipient's “attractiveness” as propensity to accept the relationship from others in general and the sender's “expansiveness” as propensity to initiate the relationship generally. Formal modelling of a relation as a combination of its three components allows for estimation of each component, given observed relations among actors. Additive, mixed additive‐multiplicative, multiplicative, and loglinear models for decomposing a relation are considered. Earlier several models have been suggested for decomposing the trade relation between countries. Comparison of the estimates obtained under various models for particular relations in trade show that the models are quite dissimilar, implying that model specification is important. For a relation which is a flow of items such as trade, probabilistic considerations and measurement properties support the loglinear model. As an application of decomposition modelling, the particular relations in trade estimated by a loglinear model are used to describe stratification in trade as statuses occupied by countries that are structurally equivalent by having similar patterns of trade.