What connects Cyberpunk 2077 game developer with a meat producer?
In 2020 CD Project, developer of bestselling game Witcher has become the largest stock company listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, in terms of capitalization. At least until the debuting of Allegro.eu SA. One can expect that such a large company has many different types of connections, but actually - how many and how different? That's what we are going to find out!
??Small-world experiment
The experiment has been conducted in 1967 by Stanley Milgram, who wanted to prove the hypothesis that human society is a small-world-type network characterized by short path-lengths.
In his experiments, a few hundred people from Boston and Omaha tried to get a letter to a target - a complete stranger in Boston. But they could only send the letter to a personal friend whom they thought was somehow closer to the target than they were. When Milgram looked at the letters that reached the target, he found that they had changed hands only about six times.
There are a number of methodological criticisms of the small-world experiment, which suggest that the average path length might actually be shorter or longer than Milgram expected.
However, that makes me think:
Is it possible to check connections between public listed companies? And if so, how are the stock companies actually connected?
?? Discovering connections between companies
By going through the register National Council of the Judiciary (Polish KRS) or looking for companies on registers like rejestr.io you can spot some patterns and a number of people or companies that repeat a lot. Those people - I call them people-hubs, in most cases, are members of the supervisory board, act as connectors between the company. With the simple assumption that members of the supervisory board and board members should know each other within the same company, we can check how two separate companies are connected to each other. And how many other companies are connected based on small-world experiment assumptions. It helped a lot that such people "work" in multiple companies at the same time!
???CD Project's network
In fact, in the CD Project's network, there are 84 public listed companies (corporations), 16 limited companies, and 51 persons acting as connectors between all those nodes.
??So how exactly is CD Project SA ?? connected with Tarczyński SA ???
To give a short answer: the shortest path between those two publicly listed companies involves three people and two companies between.
?? Of course, this is only a theoretical connection that does not indicate the type of connotation and no direct conclusions should be drawn from such a connection. ??
Nevertheless, such a visualization tool can be used to discover certain patterns and links between companies for further analysis.
What are the possible use cases for such visualization/network graphs?
Graph databases can be utilized in many industries, the most common but not limited are:
- Master Data Management
- Recommendation Engine & Product Recommendation Systems
- Social Media and Social Network Graphs
- Identity and Access Management
- and many many more... see the links at the end!
If you are interested in details on how I've discovered the mentioned connections and created those visualizations or see the ?? demo of it - let me know.
Further reading
- Graph database use cases
- How to build a recommendation system in a graph database
- Four Common Graph Database Use Cases You Need to Know
- The Science Behind Six Degrees