Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 212, 65-75 (2012)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2012-01654-7

Regular Article

The origin of asymmetric behavior of money flow in the business firm network

¹ Department of Computational Intelligence and Systems Science, Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 4259-G3-52, Nagatsuta-cho, Midori-ku, Yokohama 226-8503, Japan
² Sony Computer Science Laboratories, 3-14-13, Higashigotanda, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 141-0022, Japan
³ Meiji Institute of Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences, Meiji University, 1-1-1 Higashimita, Tama-ku, Kawasaki 214-8571, Japan

^a e-mail: miura@smp.dis.titech.ac.jp

Received: 31 May 2012
Revised: 23 July 2012
Published online: 17 September 2012

Abstract

In the business firm network, the number of in-degrees and out-degrees show the same scale-free property, however, the distribution of authorities and hubs show asymmetric behavior. Here we show the result of an analysis of the two-link structure of the network to find the origin of this asymmetric behavior. We find the tendency for big construction firms intermediating small subcontracting firms to have higher hub degrees. By measuring the strength of preferential attachment rate of new companies, we also find a abnormally strong preferential attachment for which the exponent is 1.4 with respect to out-degree when a new company forms a business partnership with a construction company. We propose a new model that reproduces the asymmetric behavior of the degrees of authorities and hubs by changing the preferential attachment rate between the in-degree and the out-degree in the business firm network.