In pursuit of social capital: Upgrading social circle through edge rewiring

The paper investigates the dynamics of the social circle of an individual in a social network. Updating social circle affects two kinds social assets: Bonding social capital which affects trusts and social support, and bridging social capital that determines information access. We address a rewiring process that enables the individual to upgrade her social circle. The questions are (1) what strategies would guide the individual to iteratively rewire social ties to gain bridging while maintain bonding social capital, and (2) what structural properties will arise as a result of applying the strategies. For the first problem, we put forward three greedy rewiring strategies based on scoping the network access for the individual. We conduct experiments over four random graph models and five real-world datasets to evaluate these strategies. The results reveal a striking difference between bonding and bridging social capitals, while the community-based strategy is able to achieve a balance between bridging with bonding social capital. For the second problem, we correlate social capital with structural features such as centrality and embeddedness. In this respect, the paper advances understanding to social capital and its connections to network structures.