Computing an effective decision making group of a society using social network analysis

Recent years have witnessed how much a decision making group can be dysfunctional due to the extreme hyperpartisanship. While partisanship is crucial for the representatives to pursue the wishes of those whom they represent for, such an extremism results in a severe gridlock in the decision making progress, and makes themselves highly inefficient. It is known that such a problem can be mitigated by having negotiators in the group. This paper investigates the potential of social network analysis techniques to choose an effective leadership group of a society such that it suffers less from the extreme hyperpartisanship. We establish three essential requirements for an effective representative group, namely Influenceability, Partisanship, and Bipartisanship. Then, we formulate the problem of finding a minimum size representative group satisfying the three requirements as the minimum connected k-core dominating set problem (MCkCDSP), and show its NP-hardness. We introduce an extension of MCkCDSP, namely MCkCDSP-C, which assumes the society has a number of sub-communities and requires at least one repThe preliminary version of this paper has been appeared in the Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON 2013) [1]. Donghyun Kim, Omid Asgari, Alade O. Tokuta Department of Mathematics and Physics, North Carolina Central University, Durham, NC 27707, USA E-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Deying Li School of Information, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, P.R. China. E-mail: [email protected] Yingshu Li Department of Computer Science, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303, USA. E-mail: [email protected] Heekuck Oh Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hanyang University, Ansan, 426-791, Rep. of Korea. E-mail: [email protected]