The analysis of interlocking directors via hypergraphs

Abstract

Since the dawn of the modern era, the associations that link companies together in the gathering and control networks have been interconnected. At the level of corporate governance, companies are linked by common stock directors, joint shareholders and joint directors (interlocking directors). Although often depicted as atomic, individual, unconnected market actors are actually embedded in such networks. In this study, we examine the network characteristics of interlocking directors of Turkish firms listed in ISO 500 and Borsa Istanbul Stock Exchange. To capture the higher order relations, we use hypergraphs to model interlocking directors and their relations. By introducing a simple graph representation based on the connectedness of agents in a hyper-network, we also give the community structure that is a cluster of densely connected nodes. The results we obtain in this study indicate that companies of Turkish market operating in global scale have central positions in their interlocking director network.