Control and voting power in corporate networks: Concepts and computational aspects

This paper proposes to rely on power indices to measure the amount of control held by individual shareholders in corporate networks. The value of the indices is determined by a complex voting game viewed as the composition of interlocked weighted majority games; the compound game reflects the structure of shareholdings. The paper describes an integrated algorithmic approach which allows to deal efficiently with the complexity of computing power indices in shareholding networks, irrespective of their size or structure. In particular, the approach explicitly accounts for the presence of float and of cyclic shareholding relationships. It has been successfully applied to the analysis of real-world financial networks. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.