IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wsi/acsxxx/v06y2003i04ns0219525903001109.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Decision Spread In The Corporate Board Network

Author

Listed:
  • STEFANO BATTISTON

    (Laboratoire de Physique Statistique, ENS, 24 rue Lhomond, 75005 Paris, France)

  • GÉRARD WEISBUCH

    (Laboratoire de Physique Statistique, ENS, 24 rue Lhomond, 75005 Paris, France)

  • ERIC BONABEAU

    (Icosystem Corp., 545 Concord Av. Cambridge, MA 02138, USA)

Abstract

The boards of large corporations sharing some of their directors are connected in complex networks. Boards are responsible for corporations' long-term strategy and are often involved in decisions about a common topic related to the belief in economical growth or recession. We are interested in understanding under which conditions a large majority of boards making the same decision can emerge in the network. We present a model where board directors are engaged in a decision-making dynamics based on "herd behavior." Boards influence each other through shared directors. We find that imitation of colleagues and opinion bias due to the interlock do not trigger an avalanche of identical decisions over the board network, whereas the information about interlocked boards' decisions does. There is no need to invoke global public information, nor external driving forces. This model provides a simple endogenous mechanism to explain the fact that boards of the largest corporations of a country can, in the span of a few months, make the same decisions about general topics.

Suggested Citation

  • Stefano Battiston & Gérard Weisbuch & Eric Bonabeau, 2003. "Decision Spread In The Corporate Board Network," Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 6(04), pages 631-644.
    • Handle: RePEc:wsi:acsxxx:v:06:y:2003:i:04:n:s0219525903001109
    DOI: 10.1142/S0219525903001109
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219525903001109
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1142/S0219525903001109?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Stefania Vitali & Stefano Battiston, 2014. "The Community Structure of the Global Corporate Network," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(8), pages 1-13, August.
    2. Evandro de Nez & Paulo Roberto da Cunha, 2018. "Influence of board interlocking in the selection of the audit firm on the mandatory caster," Contaduría y Administración, Accounting and Management, vol. 63(2), pages 5-6, Junio.
    3. Adão, Luiz F.S. & Silveira, Douglas & Ely, Regis A. & Cajueiro, Daniel O., 2022. "The impacts of interest rates on banks’ loan portfolio risk-taking," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 144(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wsi:acsxxx:v:06:y:2003:i:04:n:s0219525903001109. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tai Tone Lim (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.worldscinet.com/acs/acs.shtml .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.