Date of Award
Fall 2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Sociology
First Advisor
Sorenson, Olav
Abstract
Market actors are connected through different relationships. Through these relationships, they obtain resources, build mutual trust, and develop their advantages. Thus, the relationships shape their decision making, performance, and survival. The social embeddedness feature of market behaviors has been investigated by sociologists under various contexts over past decades. Network analysis is a powerful tool that economic sociologists utilize to examine important market activities. Three mechanisms explain the dynamics of network relationships (Rivera, Soderstrom, and Uzzi 2010). First, assortative mechanism suggests that connections are more likely to form between the social entities who share similar attributes. Second, relational mechanism emphasizes that the structural characteristics of networks and the features of the existing connections shape the dynamics of relationships among social entities. Third, proximity mechanism highlights that the broad context that social entities are embedded in plays an important role in shaping the evolution of social relationships. Despite their power in explaining complex social behaviors, we have little understanding about under what conditions the mechanisms may be exacerbated or mitigated. Many economic sociologists have been calling for the consideration of the contingences of social relationships. As Rivera et al. (2010) emphasized, “In the face of this complexity, what is clear is that understanding these contingent effects of network dynamics promises that future work will develop a greater understanding of the changing networks in which we are all embedded.” The examination of the factors that affect the interactions among social entities merit more scholarship. The goal of this dissertation is to examine three different perspectives that shape how these mechanisms play out and then influence the interactions of market actors. I utilize the real estate industry in the U.S. as the empirical setting. In the real estate industry, sellers compete with each other to sell houses at a good price in a short time. Three types of relationships are particularly important in real estate market. First, spatially proximate sellers are embedded in the same local market and compete for the same group of customers. Second, agents, who represent home owners, interact with each other through their professional networks. Third, by evaluating the attributes of agents, home owners select agents and form employment relationships. One of the three network dynamic mechanisms is exemplified in each of these three relationships. For this purpose, the three papers in this dissertation each examine different contingent factors that affect the interactions among market actors. The three articles together broaden our understanding of the dynamics of important market activities and offer insights into the conditions under which the efficiency of the market may be influenced. They show that with whom market actors would start or continue interacting is contingent on the distribution of potential contacts at temporal dimension, the context under which the prior connections were formed, and the engagement patterns across business areas. These findings promote the research on economic sociology and particularly contribute to the scholarship that approaches the question through the lens of network. They also make a methodological contribution and demonstrate how we can design the estimation to effectively capture the macro-level relationships based on the micro-level data.
Recommended Citation
Ping, Jing, "Network Dynamics in the U.S. Real Estate Industry" (2022). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 803.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/803
