Opportunistic Information Flows through Strategic Social Link Establishment

Social networks have emerged from niche existence to a mass phenomenon. Nowadays, their fundamental concepts, such as managing personal contacts and sharing profile information, are increasingly harnessed for businesses in professional environments. Similar to service-oriented networks, they allow flexible discovery on demand and loose coupling of participants. Establishing social links facilitates cooperation and enables selective sharing of information. Intuitively, one shares more information with his connected neighbors and less or even none with unrelated individuals. Today, information is one of the most important and valuable goods in business networks. Being informed about ongoing collaborations and upcoming trends is a key success factor. Thus, in professional networks, participants aim at strategically establishing connections to enable reliable information flows. In this paper, we especially highlight an opportunistic model that let mediators connect actually unrelated actors in order to benefit from information mediation. We further discuss a framework that implements this model for service-oriented professional virtual communities.