Bernardino Quattrociocchi

Classification of Networks

When the connections between firms take on a growing importance and intensity, a new economic reality known as a “network” is formed. With the formation of the network attention shifts to cooperative relationships when considering the nature of relational interconnections. The enterprise network is an organizational system that coordinates businesses, turning them into a single system of economic action. In this sense it is a form of organization that is distinct from the market, which coordinates nodes without connecting them, and also distinct from the hierarchy, which connects all nodes to one central system through systems of rules that apply to everyone. The network, however, consents to govern macro-processes, avoiding a stiffening of the structure. For this reason, it is important to consider the network as the third principle of organization compared to the hierarchy and the market, for some authors, to be able to understand in depth the nature of the new organizational forms and trends (Rullani, 1990).

Risk of Network Insolvency

The general conclusions about networks and business combinations in this chapter are related to the assessment of creditworthiness according to the principles of Basel, both in the current formulation and in the third revision (De Laurentis and Caselli, 2006; De Laurentis and Maino, 2010; Quattrociocchi, 2012b). The adoption of methodologies to calculate the rating has forced companies to redefine the policy and the conditions of financial/economic/balance stability also for the current economic cyclical scene (Mure, 2010). In particular, the introduction of Basel II has made it necessary to reconsider the models for analyzing and managing credit risk. In some cases, a reduction in faith in the reliability to businesses, especially smaller ones, of the use of balance data and automated analysis, or the anchoring of creditworthiness assessment to hard variables (Cowan and Cowan, 2006), rather than soft (Brunner et al., 2000; Grunert et al., 2005; Cattaneo et al., 2012), has sparked a chain reaction, begun during periods of tighter credit but also exacerbated by the financial crisis (Iannuzzi et al., 2011). In some cases there has been a short circuit of the bank-enterprise relationship, involving depersonalization, which has overshadowed the ability to assess intangible factors related to the entrepreneur, the history of the company, and the competitive environment (Paravani, 2006).

Estimate of Cohesion between Companies in a Network

The analysis of social networks, better known as social network analysis (SNA), is a set of methods for the analysis of reports, initially developed in sociometric studies (Wasserman and Faust, 1994). These methodologies focus on measurement of the attributes of the actors and the characteristics of relationships (Scott, 1988, 2000, 2012). They allow study of social structures through matrix calculation and represent them through graphs (Prell, 2012). In this way, it is possible to investigate the processes of mutual influence between the characteristics of the individual actors and the network structure.