Neighborhood-based models for social networks

Abstract

We argue that social networks can be modeled as the outcome of processes that occur in overlapping local regions of the network, termed local social neighborhoods. Each neighborhood is conceived as a possible site of interaction and corresponds to a subset of possible network ties. In this paper, we discuss hypotheses about the form of these neighborhoods, and we present two new and theoretically plausible ways in which neighborhood-based models for networks can be constructed. In the first, we introduce the notion of a setting structure, a directly hypothesized (or observed) set of exogenous constraints on possible neighborhood forms. In the second, we propose higher-order neighborhoods tha..