A Weighted and Normalized Gould-Fernandez Brokerage Measure


Abstract in English

Gould and Fernandez (1989) developed a local brokerage measure that defines brokering roles based on the group membership of the nodes from the incoming and outgoing edges. This paper extends on this brokerage measure to account for weighted edges and introduces the Weighted-Normalized Gould-Fernandez measure (WNGF). The measure is applied to the EUREGIO inter-regional trade dataset that is a complete, weighted, and directed graph, when transformed. The results gained from the WNGF measure are compared to those from two dichotomized networks: a threshold network and a multiscale backbone network. The results show that edge-weights carry important information regarding the network structure and that retaining edge-weight information ensures the heterogeneity and the nuanced understanding of the brokerage roles.

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