IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2013 - 10

BOOK REVIEW

CHEN HONGSONG

Networks, Crowds, and Markets:
Reasoning about a Highly
Connected World
By David Easley and Jon Kleinberg. Cambridge Univ. Press, U.K., 2010, 744 pages.

he complexity and volume of connections of
modern society are increasing. The growth
in our connections is found in many activities: in the rapid growth of the Internet, in
financial markets, in global communication services,
in the spread of news and information, as well as epidemics and monetary crises. These are phenomena
that involve networks, incentives, and the aggregate
behavior of groups of people; they are based on the
links that connect us. The book, Networks, Crowds,
and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected
World, describes an emerging field addressing fundamental questions about how the information, social,
economic, and physical worlds are connected. The
book was written by two authors at Cornell University,
teaching in departments of Economics and Computer
Science, who are particularly sensitive to interaction
between computing and the social sciences. Kleinberg
is a winner of a MacArthur "genius" grant. Their book
has been awarded the Lanchester Prize for the best
recent work on operations and management science.
"Network" is flexibly defined in this work. A network is any collection of objects in which some pairs
of the objects are connected by links. As relationships
or connections are universal in the real world and
modern society, researchers from different domains
can contribute to network science research.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2013.2276667
Date of publication: 26 September 2013

The goal of the authors is to give the reader multidisciplinary perspectives to understand networks at various levels. The book is based on an undergraduate course
titled Networks, that they developed and taught at Cornell. Many real world examples are used to explain the
theories referred to in the book. Readers who have varied
knowledge and understanding of networks will probably
find the content that they are interested in.
The book is vast. There are 744 pages and 423
references, and graph and game theory are the foundations of the entire work. Each part provides strict
proofs of key results and rich literature references,
while remaining accessible to the undergraduate with
only a general mathematics background.
The text combines economics, sociology, information science, and applied mathematics to explain
networks, behaviors, and interactions. It describes the
emerging fields of study that are growing at the interface of these areas. Through the book, the reader can
appreciate the beauty of mathematical abstraction in
network and market areas. The confluence of ideas
inspires the beginnings of new intersections for study.
The book can be used at both an introductory and
advanced levels. It helps readers understand the structure, function, and dynamics of networks in society.
This book successfully combines graph theory and
game theory to enhance the study of social, economic, and computer networks. It is a good beginning
(continued on page 30)

Chen Hongsong is an associate professor in School of Computer and Communication Engineering, University of Science
and Technology Beijing, Beijing, 100083, P.R. China. His research interests include social network and security analysis, information network security, trust cloud computing. Email: chenhs@ustb.edu.cn.
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IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

fALL 2013

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