Solidarity in collaboration networks when everyone competes for the strongest partner: a stochastic actor-based simulation model

ABSTRACT

This article examines the emergence of solidarity from interactions between professionals competing for collaboration. Research on multiplex collaboration networks has shown that economic exchange can elicit solidarity when mediated by trust but did not consider the effect of competition. To fill this gap, we built an agent-based model that simulates the evolution of a multiplex network of collaboration, trust, and support expectations. Simulations show that while resource heterogeneity is key for collaboration, competition for attractive collaboration partners penalizes low-resource professionals, who are less connected and highly segregated. Heterogeneous resource distribution can trigger segregation because of preferential selection of resourceful peers and reciprocity. Interestingly, we also found that low-resource professionals can reduce their marginalization by building in-group mutual support expectations.

KEYWORDS:

• Solidarity
• collaboration networks
• competition
• multiplex networks
• agent-based model
• stochastic actor-oriented model

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ We performed robustness tests by initializing the model with $X^{(C)}$ being an Erdös-Renyi random network with density values$d=[0.1,0.2,0.3,0.4,0.5]$. We did not observe any relevant qualitative differences of simulation results.

² In order to calculate average values of gross segregation we did not consider those simulation outcomes with $s=+\mathrm{\infty }$ values, which occurred in those cases where $BC=0$ because$B=0$, i.e. there were no between-group Mutual support expectation ties. The amount of such cases accounted for 0.012% of the simulation realizations in the worst case (Competition/neediness scenario).

³ By setting Transitive triplets parameter of $X^{(S)}$ to 0, we did not obtain qualitatively different results. This suggests that the observed dynamics could not be attributed to transitive closure (see SI for more information).