Measuring Properties of Dynamic Customer-Supplier Networks

Classical economic models often place emphasis on the aggregate interactions of suppliers and consumers in a marketplace, and many assume market actors have easy access to shared, trustworthy information. While these models have been widely effective in describing economic phenomena, they neglect an inherent and important property of economies: that they are networks of independent firms, interacting with a relatively small set of business partners, and operating with a fraction of total information about the economy. Some questions in microeconomics do indeed focus on the behaviors of a single or a small set of firms, however there is still a large gap in our understanding of how economies work from the networkanalytic perspective.