Bonacich

Bonacich refers to Edouard Bonacich, a sociologist known for introducing a central concept in social network analysis, and to the centrality measure named after him. The Bonacich centrality is a family of centrality measures that quantify a node’s influence in a network by considering both its own connections and the centrality of its neighbors. It is also called alpha-centrality or Bonacich power centrality in some contexts.

Bonacich’s work focuses on how power and influence propagate through social structures. In centrality, he proposed a formal way to capture the idea that a node is important not only because it has many ties, but also because it is connected to others who are themselves well connected. The centrality measure is defined with two parameters that weight the contribution of neighboring nodes’ centralities and a baseline effect. In practice, varying these parameters yields a spectrum of measures between simple degree centrality and eigenvector centrality. When the influence parameter approaches certain critical values, the measure converges to eigenvector centrality, linking Bonacich centrality to other well-known centrality concepts.

Applications of Bonacich centrality span sociology, economics, and network science. It has been used to study power and influence in organizations, communities, and economic networks, as well as to compare actors within complex systems. The concept remains a foundational element in discussions of centrality, offering a flexible framework for assessing the relative importance of nodes in a network according to both local and global structure. See also eigenvector centrality and degree centrality.