ICFSN 2009 - DIME International Conference on the Formation and the Evolution of Social and Economic Networks

Many scholars have acknowledged that social connections affect individual (and thus collective) performances in many contexts (e.g. personal networks in labour markets, knowledge and innovation networks, buyer-sellers market networks, informal networks within organizations and regional networks). Beyond the great variety of such social networks, common tools have been developed for measuring and analysing them. During the last decade especially, an enormous amount of attention has indeed been dedicated to the systematic analysis of social networks and much still need to be done on the measures and on the structural properties of social and economic networks.

The attention also focuses now much on the principles that govern the evolution of these networks as a mean to explain how these networks came to be formed. The various theoretical models that have been (and still are) developed in different disciplines should now be fruitfully compared especially in their capacity to explain social networks formation and evolution. The joint improvement of existing theoretical models and of empirical methods for testing network dynamics is particularly needed.

For these aims, we organize an international conference which brings together a variety of approaches and theoretical tools.

This conference will thus have an interdisciplinary character that is consistent with the nature of the topic and its recent developments. In particular, the conference is opened to scholars concerned with this issue in the fields of Economics of Innovation and Technology, Sociology, Management Strategy, Theoretical Economics, and Theoretical Physics.