The Swiss Board Directors Network in 2009

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the structure of Swiss board director networks in 2009, revealing how key actors and links facilitate information flow through centrality, k-core analysis, and epidemic simulations.

Contribution

It extends previous studies by providing a detailed analysis of director and board centrality, k-core structure, and information propagation dynamics in the Swiss board network.

Findings

Key actors and links are crucial for information flow.

Network topology influences epidemic spread among directors.

Swiss board networks show evolved structures with central actors.

Abstract

We study the networks formed by the directors of the most important Swiss boards and the boards themselves for the year 2009. The networks are obtained by projection from the original bipartite graph. We highlight a number of important statistical features of those networks such as degree distribution, weight distribution, and several centrality measures as well as their interrelationships. While similar statistics were already known for other board systems, and are comparable here, we have extended the study with a careful investigation of director and board centrality, a k-core analysis, and a simulation of the speed of information propagation and its relationships with the topological aspects of the network such as clustering and link weight and betweenness. The overall picture that emerges is one in which the topological structure of the Swiss board and director networks has evolved in such a way that special actors and links between actors play a fundamental role in the flow of information among distant parts of the network. This is shown in particular by the centrality measures and by the simulation of a simple epidemic process on the directors network.