Social Networks

This journal issue contains the first of two connected speial issues on Dynamics of Social Networks. This second special ssue will appear later this year. For a rather long time, attention o dynamic aspects in Social Network Analysis took the form of escriptive studies. However, over the last fifteen years modelasedapproaches to studyingnetworkchangehavebeenflowering. andmarks were three special issues on Network Evolution of he Journal of Mathematical Sociology, edited by Frans Stokman nd Patrick Doreian, in 1996 (with a book version: Doreian and tokman, 1997), 2001, and 2003. These three special issues demontrated how formal and statistical modeling and empirical analysis ere coming together. The 2001 and 2003 special issues were ocused on joining of theoretical developmentswith the analysis of mpirical datausingadvancedmodeling. This special issuepresents continuationof jointly using theories andmodeling tounderstand ocial network phenomena. In the first paper, Corten and Buskens (2010) adopt a gameheoretical approach to study how, in a well defined context, ehavioral choices as well as network ties can be changed by ctors. Their study unites various elements: evolution of convenions, network dynamics, game theory, computer simulations, and aboratory experiments. This combination of approaches is relaively novel and very promising. In their tests of micro-level and acro-level hypotheses, one of the findings is that there are clear eviations from myopic best-response behavior, an often-used euristic in dynamic game theory. The authors interpret thesedevitions as signs of anticipatory behavior and as memory effects. A ajor result of their paper is the demonstration of how human ctors, linked in an experimental setting for self-formed networks, an coordinate their actions to produce efficient outcomes and that his coordination was promoted by these deviations. Next, Roth and Cointet (2010) examine the evolution of socioognitive systems by considering the entwined dynamics of the ocial network of citations and the semantic network of use of oncepts. In two contrasting cases, they study the network of esearchers of the Zebrafish and the network of bloggers in an early hase of the 2008 US presidential election. This joint attention to itations and semantics permits the study of the coevolution of a ne-mode and a two-mode network in an innovative and intersting fashion. For example, they find that the preference to form inks to high-degree nodes (cf. de Solla Price, 1976) holds in both he citation and semantic networks. This effect is stronger for the cientists than for the bloggers. Roth and Cointet discuss whether his preference is to be interpreted as differential attractivity – one ould, perhaps, say status – or as differential activity, and suggest hat the latter is a better interpretation. Further they obtain clear