title: Network structure of production.
abstract: Complex social networks have received increasing attention from researchers. Recent work has focused on mechanisms that produce scale-free networks. We theoretically and empirically characterize the buyer-supplier network of the US economy and find that purely scale-free models have trouble matching key attributes of the network. We construct an alternative model that incorporates realistic features of firms' buyer-supplier relationships and estimate the model's parameters using microdata on firms' self-reported customers. This alternative framework is better able to match the attributes of the actual economic network and aids in further understanding several important economic phenomena.
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
authors.forename: Enghin
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Atalay
authors.forename: Ali
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hortaçsu
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Roberts
authors.forename: Chad
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Syverson
mesh_terms: D003132:Commerce / Q000191:economics*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004467:Economics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011336:Probability; D012944:Social Support; D014481:United States