Two NERDS papers out: Committed Minorities from Reddit to Wall Street and Multilayer Network Distances

We are on a streak and just published two more papers!

    1. From Reddit to Wall Street: the role of committed minorities in financial collective action, by L. Lucchini, L.M. Aiello, L. Alessandretti, G. De Francisci Morales, M. Starnini and A. Baronchelli, published in Royal Society Open Science

      We analyzed the coordinated activity on Reddit that led to target short-selling activity by hedge funds on GameStop shares, causing a surge in the share price and triggering significant losses for the funds involved. We found that a small fraction of individuals can trigger large behavioural cascades, and we show the role of commitment, network centrality, and social identity in such coordination process. Our findings shed light on financial collective action, which several observers anticipate will grow in importance.
    2. Generalized Euclidean Measure to Estimate Distances on Multilayer Networks, by M. Coscia, published in ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data

      In this paper we propose an algorithm solving node vector distance for multilayer networks, which is a problem that arises for all kinds of network spreading processes like epidemics, economic growth, or human behavior. We do so by adapting the Mahalanobis distance, incorporating the graph’s topology via the pseudoinverse of its Laplacian. Since this is a proper generalization of the Euclidean distance in a complex space defined by the topology of the graph, and that it works on multilayer networks, we call our measure the Multi Layer Generalized Euclidean (MLGE).