Informational Complexity and the Flow of Knowledge Across Social Boundaries

Synthesizing social network theory with a view of knowledge transfer as a search process, the authors argue that knowledge inequality across social boundaries should reach its peak when the underlying knowledge is of moderate complexity. To test this hypothesis, we analyze patent data and compare citation rates across three types of social boundaries: within versus outside the firm, geographically near to versus far from the inventor, and internal versus external to the technological class.