What is PeopleAnalyst?

PeopleAnalyst is the front door for people-analytics research: 205+ works indexed and profiled, 40+ citation-grade findings extracted, and peer-reviewed behavioral science translated from academic to actionable — the missing manual for the people analytics you always meant to do.

What is people analytics?

People analytics is not a dashboard. It is behavioral science and statistical inference applied to workforce decisions — a discipline with its own methodology, spanning measurement, organizational design, talent, leadership, and analytics craft.

Why does AI in HR need measurement science?

AI is being deployed in high-stakes people decisions — hiring, performance, attrition — without the measurement science to evaluate whether it works or whom it harms. Construct validity, effect sizes, and criterion validity are the vocabulary for asking an AI vendor the right questions.

How is the research made accessible?

The evidence is indexed and searchable: 205+ works, 40+ citation-grade insight cards, and 8 research arcs, so the right finding reaches the right decision at the right time.

What separates good people measurement from assertion?

Good measurement has a method: construct validity, reliability, and effect-size interpretation are not optional — they are what separates evidence from assertion.

library / lib15eb87144980dd69

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World

David Easley, Jon Kleinberg · 2010

In a sentence

An interdisciplinary introduction to how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected through networks, and how individual behavior aggregates into population-wide outcomes via structure, incentives, and feedback effects.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets unifies ideas from economics, sociology, computer science, and applied mathematics to explain how highly connected systems operate. Drawing on graph theory to characterize network structure and game theory to model strategic behavior, the book shows how phenomena as diverse as the spread of epidemics, the success of Web search engines, the dynamics of financial crises, the formation of opinions, and the rise of popular fads all emerge from the interplay between the links connecting individuals and the incentives shaping their decisions. Accessible to readers with only precalculus background, it builds from fundamental concepts—triadic closure, strong and weak ties, Nash equilibrium, matching markets, information cascades, network effects, power laws, and the small-world phenomenon—to reveal the deep structural unity underlying connectedness in modern society. It is both a coherent textbook and a synthesis that demonstrates how local processes produce global consequences.

The four lenses

Science
Statistics
Systems
Strategy

The model

A causal framework in which network structure (design levers and contextual conditions) and individual strategic behavior jointly drive psychological/behavioral states (imitation, expectations, influence), which produce aggregate outcomes such as cascades, prices, power distributions, and the spread of behaviors and diseases. Inferred from the book's recurring theme that local structure and individual incentives combine via feedback to generate population-level effects.

Network Structurecontextual condition

The pattern of links connecting nodes (people, pages, firms, organisms), including density, paths, clustering, components, and positions such as bridges and structural holes. It constrains who can interact with and influence whom.

Tie Strengthcontextual condition

The strength of a relationship between two connected nodes, distinguishing strong ties (close, frequent contacts embedded in clusters) from weak ties (casual contacts that often serve as local bridges spanning network regions).

Strategic Incentives and Payoffsdesign lever

The payoff structure facing each agent, where outcomes depend on the agent's own choices and the choices of others. This is the design lever expressed through game rules, auction formats, prices, and mechanism design.

Homophily and Similaritycontextual condition

The principle that individuals tend to be connected to others who are similar to them along immutable and mutable characteristics, shaping both link formation (selection) and the contextual basis for influence.

Individual Expectations and Beliefspsychological state

Each agent's beliefs about the state of the world and about how others will behave, formed via private signals, observation of others' actions, and Bayesian updating. These beliefs mediate the link between incentives/structure and behavior.

Imitation and Social Influencebehavioral pattern

The behavioral tendency for agents to align their choices with the choices of others, driven by informational effects (others' actions convey information) and direct-benefit/network effects (aligning yields direct payoff). Mediates how structure and beliefs translate into action.

Adoption Thresholdpsychological state

The fraction of an individual's network neighbors who must adopt a behavior before the individual finds it optimal to adopt, derived from the coordination payoffs between the two behaviors.

Contagion Probabilitycontextual condition

The probability that an infected/adopting node passes a disease or behavior to a susceptible neighbor across an edge, combined with the number of contacts to determine spreading power (basic reproductive number).

Feedback and Rich-Get-Richer Dynamicsbehavioral pattern

Self-reinforcing processes in which an early advantage in popularity, adoption, or wealth share increases the rate of further gains, amplifying small differences over time. Mediates between behavior and aggregate distributional outcomes.

Information Asymmetrycontextual condition

A condition in which one side of a transaction has better information about quality or value than the other, leading to adverse selection where uninformed parties' expectations shape which goods enter the market.

Externalitiescontextual condition

Uncompensated effects of one agent's actions on others' welfare, either negative (congestion, pollution) or positive (network effects), which cause market equilibria to deviate from social optimality absent property rights or mechanisms.

Cascade and Diffusion Outcomeoutcome metric

The aggregate extent to which a behavior, innovation, opinion, or disease spreads through the population, ranging from dying out quickly to a complete cascade reaching everyone.

Market Prices and Allocationoutcome metric

The equilibrium prices, matchings, and allocations of goods/items to agents that emerge from strategic interaction, market-clearing, or auction mechanisms.

Power and Outcome Distributionoutcome metric

The distribution of bargaining power, payoffs, popularity, or wealth across nodes, determined by their network positions and the resulting imbalances in exchange and influence.

How they connect

network structure → influences imitation influence
network structure → predicts power distribution
tie strength → moderates cascade diffusion outcome
homophily similarity → influences network structure
strategic incentives → influences individual expectations
individual expectations → predicts imitation influence
imitation influence → predicts cascade diffusion outcome
adoption threshold − moderates cascade diffusion outcome
contagion probability → predicts cascade diffusion outcome
network structure → influences cascade diffusion outcome
imitation influence → predicts feedback effects
feedback effects → predicts power distribution
strategic incentives → predicts market prices allocation
individual expectations → influences market prices allocation
information asymmetry − moderates market prices allocation
externalities − moderates market prices allocation
strategic incentives → influences imitation influence

The story

The reader A curious student or thoughtful reader who wants to understand how the highly connected modern world—social ties, markets, the Web, and the spread of ideas and diseases—actually works.

External problem

The connectedness of modern society produces complex, surprising outcomes (cascades, crashes, viral spread, power imbalances) that are scattered across many disciplines and hard to reason about coherently.

Internal problem

The reader feels overwhelmed and intellectually disoriented by phenomena that seem chaotic, counterintuitive, or driven by forces they cannot name or predict.

Philosophical problem

It is wrong to treat economic, social, and technological systems as separate and opaque when in fact they share a common underlying logic that can be understood with a unified set of ideas.

The plan

Learn the structural language of networks through graph theory (paths, components, ties, clustering).
Learn to reason about incentives and strategic behavior through game theory and equilibrium.
Combine structure and behavior to understand markets, power, search, and auctions in networks.
Study population-level dynamics: cascades, network effects, power laws, diffusion, small worlds, and epidemics.
Understand how institutions like markets, voting, and property rights aggregate individual behavior into collective outcomes.

Success

The reader can recognize and analyze network structure and strategic behavior in real social, economic, and technological systems.
The reader can predict and explain counterintuitive phenomena like Braess's Paradox, information cascades, tipping points, and market failures.
The reader develops a powerful 'network perspective' for thinking about complex systems and the feedback effects within them.

At stake

The reader continues to see networked phenomena as mysterious, disconnected, and unpredictable.
The reader misinterprets crowd behavior, market signals, and structural advantages, drawing wrong conclusions from aggregate outcomes.
The reader misses the deep connections linking social influence, markets, search, and contagion.

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