News Finding:  the existence of a heterogeneous cost to relationships (in terms of time or cognitive investment), together with a limitation in the total capacity an individual has to invest in them, can naturally explain the existence of layers in social networks
Paper Finding: Finally, from a socio-centric perspective, our model suggests a way to identify whether an interconnected set of individuals (i.e., a community in the technical network analysis sense) is "small" or not, namely according to the regime of their ego networks.
News Context:  the existence of a heterogeneous cost to relationships (in terms of time or cognitive investment), together with a limitation in the total capacity an individual has to invest in them, can naturally explain the existence of layers in social networks
Paper Context: This would incentivize weak relationships, which might well be another reason why the inverse regime has remained largely unnoticed until now. Finally, from a socio-centric perspective, our model suggests a way to identify whether an interconnected set of individuals (i.e., a community in the technical network analysis sense) is "small" or not, namely according to the regime of their ego networks. In such a setting we find that the change of regime happens at a network size of 88 and that there is a maximum network size of 220 [a value close to the maximum observed network size of ∼250 ].