Social Network Analysis of Online Marketplaces

This paper presents a preliminary effort on visualization and analysis of social networks for online marketplaces. We use one of the most popular e-business models, eBay, as a case study. By extracting relevant data, we generate tree structure displays using ´Prefuse´ interactive visualization toolkit, and study the social interaction among sellers and buyers, across geographical boundaries. We also illustrate how this study can improvise our understanding of online customer interaction patterns. Such an analysis could lead to possible enhancements to the current e-business models.