Structural correlates of stability and resilience in strong hierarchies

✍ Scribed by Scott Findlay; Ligang Zheng

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1993
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 797 KB
• Volume: 55
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1522-9602
• DOI: 10.1016/s0092-8240(05)80239-3

✦ Synopsis

We investigated the structural correlates of stability and resilience in strong hierarchies, that is, systems that can be represented by a rooted tree. A simple exponential model that incorporates three variables (the total number of nodes N; the number of basal nodes nn ; and the number of single links among nodes Nt) accounts for 95% of the observed variability in stability among trees in our sample population. For resilience the situation is even simpler, with about 89% of the population variation being accounted for by tree size (N). For strong hierarchies, size and shape are the principal correlates of stability, while size alone explains the major proportion of the variability in resilience among stable trees. These results suggest that reasonably accurate statistical predictions about the stability and resilience of strong hierarchies can be made from a small set of (relatively) easily measured variables, without detailed knowledge of system topology.