Toward economic function of elite social networks

Quantifying historical developments is crucial for understanding a large variety of complex processes from economy to political conflict, population dynamics and urban evolution. Yet the driving force of emergent processes in history is a product of complex interactions among massive individuals, in which the elite class plays a vital role. With the social relations of elites in ancient China, the dynamical elite social networks are compiled from the year 618 to 1840. We systematically investigate the dynamical structure of elite social networks, which significantly evolves with major historical events. We detect that the macroeconomic performance affects the structure of elite social networks comprehensively, while only the assortative coefficient and average shortest path length have a predictive ability on the economy. Then the evolutionary game theory is introduced to simulate how the structure of elite social network influences the economy. Our work provides a framework to study the economic function of real-world social networks from the perspective of the elite class.