Using Social Network Analysis to Study Diversity in Business Partnerships

Understanding the key elements of successful business partnerships is of a significant economic value. In this paper we study the diversity of business partnerships using real data that we extracted from trade license registrations from 2015 to 2017 (in a major cosmopolitan city in the Middle East). The dataset consists of more than twenty thousand trade licenses and thirty-nine thousand business partners. We view the data set as an evolving social network, where a node represents a partner, an edge represents partnership, and an edge's weight represents the number of trade licenses shared between the two connected partners. Our results show that while the business partnerships show diversity with respect to age and nationality, there is a lack of diversity when it comes to gender.