Ranking the Importance of Boards of Directors

We measure the importance (centrality) of boards of directors using the PageRank algorithm from computational graph theory. PageRank is at the heart of the immensely successful Google web search engine and, we argue, can be naturally extended to social network settings. In this view, a board can be represented as part of an affiliation network or, in graph theoretic-terms, an undirected bipartite graph. But PageRank operates on directed graphs, so we develop a procedure to pass from an undirected bipartite graph to appropriately weighted, directed projections. Finally, we present the rankings of publicly traded US and UK firms using this method.

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