Topology of large-scale engineering problem-solving networksDanBrahaauthorYaneerBar-YamauthorThe last few years have led to a series of discoveries that uncovered statistical properties that are common
to a variety of diverse real-world social, information, biological, and technological networks. The goal of the
present paper is to investigate the statistical properties of networks of people engaged in distributed problem
solving and discuss their significance. We show that problem-solving networks have properties ~sparseness,
small world, scaling regimes! that are like those displayed by information, biological, and technological
networks. More importantly, we demonstrate a previously unreported difference between the distribution of
incoming and outgoing links of directed networks. Specifically, the incoming link distributions have sharp
cutoffs that are substantially lower than those of the outgoing link distributions ~sometimes the outgoing
cutoffs are not even present!. This asymmetry can be explained by considering the dynamical interactions that
take place in distributed problem solving and may be related to differences between each actor’s capacity to
process information provided by others and the actor’s capacity to transmit information over the network. We
conjecture that the asymmetric link distribution is likely to hold for other human or nonhuman directed
networks when nodes represent information processing and using elements.Decision TheoryApplied Cognitive PsychologySociobiologyBehavioral BiologyCognitive PsychologyTheoretical BiologySocial PsychologyBehavioral Analysis2004-01Other