Dresden 2017 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 15: Focus Session: Cities as complex systems
SOE 15.8: Talk
Wednesday, March 22, 2017, 17:00–17:15, GÖR 226
Scaling of professional connections and urban performance — •Stanislav Sobolevsky1, Iva Bojic2, Lyndsey Rolheiser2, Anthony Vanky2, Homgmou Zhang2, and Vijayragunath Aruswamy3 — 1New York University — 2Massachusetts Institute Of Technology — 3LinkedIn Corporation
Recent studies showed that many aggregated socio-economic characteristics of the city, such as productivity, wealth, innovation, crime as well as communication amount do not just grow proportionally with the size of the city, but scale superlinearly with city population, meaning that bigger cities boost up various aspects -- both positive and negative -- of socio-economic activity per capita. In this research we consider another important quantity: connectivity of professional population as measured by the amount of LinkedIn connections and analyze its relation to the size of the city and its socio-economic performance characteristics. Consistent with those previous findings, our results show that professional connectivity across the US cities scales superlinearly with the city size, and the superlinearity is pretty strong, as characterized by the high scaling exponent of about 1.3. Scaling is confirmed for all different types of connections: internal (between city residents), external domestic, as well as foreign. The scaling exponent however happens to depend largely on the industry, being the lowest for manufacturing, transportation, construction and the highest for the media, arts and design. Similar patterns are also observed in European countries, namely Spain, Germany and France. Despite of an overall scaling trend, each particular city has its own individual connectivity pattern, which can be characterized by the coefficient of the connectivity over/underperformance vs. the expectation for the city of the considered size. Finally, this relative connectivity appears to be highly correlated with other socio-economic characteristics of the city, such as income or unemployment (negative correlation in the latter case), showing that the increased connectivity comes together with the socio-economic progress and can be potentially used as an indicator for it.