Dear TEKPOL Partners,

We will be proceeding with TEKPOL Pizza Seminars in Spring Semester 2024, with valuable on-line and in-person guests throughout the year.

Our third guest this semester will be Zakaria Babutsidze, from SKEMA Business School from Université Côte d'Azur. His presentation title will be; Co-authorship as the means to build social capital and its effects on scientific productivity.

The seminar will be held on 19 April (Friday) 2024, at 12:30 pm Turkey time (GMT +3), 11:30 France time through Microsoft Teams. Meeting link will be shared with the registered participants before the session.

The moderation of the seminar will be conducted by Prof. Semih Akcomak from METU TEKPOL.

Registration is mandatory and the form can be reached through this link:

https://forms.gle/YbbQiHsUuR4j2byz9

It is possible to register until Thursday evening before the seminar (18 April 2024)

Hope to see you there.

TEKPOL Team

About Zakaria Babutsidze:

Zakaria Babutsidze is a Professor of Economics at SKEMA Business School (a member of Université Côte d'Azur). He is also an Economist at the Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Économiques (Sciences Po Paris) and a member of GREDEG (CNRS UMR 7321). He obtained his BA in Economics Tbilisi State (2003), MA in Economcis, Central European University (2005, Budapest, HU) and PhD in Economics, Maastricht University (2010, Maastricht, NL).

About the Seminar:

We formalise the idea that co-authorship allows scientists to build their social capital by receiving an access to resources embedded in their co-authors. Higher social capital, in turn, results in increased productivity. We emphasize the trade-off between co-authoring with many other scientists to get direct access to their resources, and co-authoring with a few (but well connected) scientists who could provide indirect access to resources of their co-authors. The latter option implies degrading the quality of resource access compared to the former, but can result in cost reduction by minimizing the number of links focal scientist needs to maintain. The trade-off comes from the fact that maintaining a collaboration link is costly - it requires attention from a scientist, which is a limited resource. Based on a formal model, we quantify the value of social capital for a scientist embedded in an arbitrary collaborative network. We show that the relationship between the direct resource access share (i.e., the resources that the scientist can access through direct relations as a fraction of all available resources in their network) and the value of the focal scientist's social capital has a U shape. We also derive secondary implications of the model concerning the effects of the collaboration patterns among other scientists on the productivity of the focal scientist. The analysis of patenting data of French inventors supports hypotheses derived from the formal model. Implications for the optimal co-author selection, as well as the optimal research team design are discussed.