“Doing business with social networks: which contribution by the public actor?”

The aim of this study is to provide a theoretical application and empiri- cal evidence on the effect of public policies in creating and developing relation- ships among users of a business social network composed by SMEs. A set of hy- pothesis is developed adopting the social network theory and tested on a business social network composed by a panel dataset of 14.135 users and 6.867 SMEs traded in Italy. Consistently with our theoretical model, we show that the role of the public actor, as a creator and promoter of the business social network, have a different impact on the creation and evolution of relationship among users over a 2-years time frame. The results have several important implications on the social network theory according to the different development of users relationships in a business social network created by a public actor compared to a private business social network.