Application of Network Analysis Techniques for Japanese Corporate Transaction Network

In recent years, several social activities have been shifting into networked virtual society, called Cybersociety, because of the rapid advancement of network technologies. For designing and realizing a new service in Cybersociety, it is crucial to fully investigate the desired structure of commercial transactions and circulation activities in the Cybersociety. For this purpose, it must be fruitful to investigate the structure of business relationships among existing corporations in real society, which are believed to be working effectively. In this paper, by utilizing a corporate information database, we first build a corporate transaction network based on the dealings information among Japanese corporations. We then investigate the structure of the corporate transaction network by applying several network analysis techniques, which have been used for analyzing various social networks. We show that the average distance of the corporate transaction network is approximately 3.4-5.4, and that it has a scale-free property with a power-law index of 2.1. We also show that our proposed structural superiority index of the corporate transaction network is greatly related to several stock price indices and profit financial indices