Identifying firms’ positions in business networks

Lately, business practices and researches have been focused on understanding a firm‟s position, especially in network environment, where the essence of network manifests the complexity. Therefore, it is hard to identify positions, because all firms with multiple interrelations were characterized by multilayer network organizations and multilateral interactions. This study proposes a quantitative method to measure a firm‟s position in business networks. Based on the relations and power of business networks, the graph theory is applied to configure the firms‟ positioning. Then, the advantageous and disadvantageous positions of each firm can be ranked, compared and revealed. Furthermore, managerial interpretation can identify the firm‟s direct or indirect competitions and the firm‟s network relationship type in the business network.