Axiomatic Foundations of Centrality in Networks

The social and economic networks literature commonly uses different measures to capture various notions of centrality. Given the structural features of a network, there is limited consensus on how to select the appropriate centrality measure. This paper provides an axiomatic characterization of Degree, Closeness and Decay centrality measures and argues that such axiomatizations are the correct way to distinguish between centrality measures. Further, I show that these centrality measures belong to the same family of measures. This result shows why they have been found to be correlated in empirical work.

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