This article argues that consideration of the strength of ties between communicators can help reconcile disparate results on the impact of new media on social relations. It is argued from the research literature and studies by the author that where ties are strong, communicators can in uence each other to adapt and expand their use of media to support the exchanges important to their tie, but ...

Using large-scale call detail records of anonymised mobile phone service subscribers with demographic and location information, we investigate how a long-distance residential move within the country affects communication patterns between an ego who moved frequently called alter did not move. By using clustering methods in analysing frequency time series, find that such ego-alter pairs are group...

Scholars have found contradictory effects of strong ties in interfirm relations. They are considered both beneficial and detrimental for knowledge acquisition and innovation. In consequence, the debate on this paradox is flourishing. We wish to contribute to the discussion using a construct –relational bondingoriginally developed in studies on vertical interfirm relationships in business-to-bus...

We consider instances of the classical stable marriage problem in which persons may include ties in their preference lists. We show that, in such a setting, strong lower bounds hold for the approximability of each of the problems of finding an egalitarian, minimum regret and sex-equal stable matching. We also consider stable marriage instances in which persons may express unacceptable partners ...

Science is increasingly dominated by teams. Understanding patterns of scientific collaboration and their impacts on the productivity and evolution of disciplines is crucial to understand scientific processes. Electronic bibliography offers a unique opportunity to map and investigate the nature of scientific collaboration. Recent studies have demonstrated a counterintuitive organizational patter...

We propose a relational theory of how change agents in organizations use the strength of ties in their network to overcome resistance to change. We argue that strong ties to potentially influential organization members who are ambivalent about a change (fence-sitters) provide the change agent with an affective basis to coopt them. This cooptation increases the probability that the organization ...

Voting rules allow groups of agents to aggregate their preferences in order to reach joint decisions. The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, a seminal result in social choice theory, implies that, when agents have strict preferences, all anonymous, Pareto-optimal, and single-valued voting rules can be strategically manipulated. In this paper, we consider multi-agent voting when there can be ties in...

In most social and information systems the activity of agents generates rapidly evolving time-varying networks. The temporal variation in networks' connectivity patterns and the ongoing dynamic processes are usually coupled in ways that still challenge our mathematical or computational modelling. Here we analyse a mobile call dataset and find a simple statistical law that characterize the tempo...