Social Networks 185
partners friends and friends relatives. Engelbrecht Witte from Riga, the later
father-in-law of Hildebrand Vechinchusen, married his daughter into the
Veckinchusen family with a clear aim at becoming friends with that family.53
Hence, Hanseatic trade networks appear to have been a so-called “small world”,54
as they allowed each member to contact any other participant through only a
few mediating persons, despite having a weak overall density and having been
fragmented into separate subgroups.
Coordination Mechanisms to Make Business Networks Working
In networks like the multiple Hanseatic business partnerships, problems like
free-riding and cheating often arose,55 especially if a considerably large num-
ber of members were involved.56 With a lack of written contracts, it seems as
though it must have been very easy to participate in a commercial network of
Hanseatic merchants and take personal benefits for free. In principle, this was
possible if a merchant refused to contribute substantially to the diffusion of
goods within the network. For example, a merchant would sell another mer-
chant’s goods and pocket the profit, without sending goods back for recom-
pensation, as it was usually done in reciprocal trade. However, a fair exchange
between merchants within these business networks could be guaranteed by
different mechanisms—culture, trust, and reputation.
Coordination by culture57 was essential to make business networks run
smoothly. In general, when merchants shared common values, mutual coop-
eration was facilitated. The spread of common values across the Baltic and
the creation of a Hanseatic cultural identity were more or less a by-product
of migration, as shown earlier. First, the common Lower German language
53 Irsigler, “Alltag” (see footnote 48), 81; Id., “Der hansische Handel im Spätmittelalter,” in
Jörgen Bracker, ed., Die Hanse: Lebenswirklichkeit und Mythos. Katalog der Ausstellung im
Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte 1989 (Lübeck: Schmidt-Römhild, 1989), 518–532, 530.
54 Duncan Watts, “Networks, Dynamics, and the Small-World Phenomenon,” American
Journal of Sociology 105 (1999), 493–527, 495–498.
55 Leigh Tesfatsion, “A Trade Network Game with Endogenous Partner Selection,” in
Hans Amman, Berc Rustem, and Andrew Whinston, eds., Computational Approaches to
Economic Problems, Advances in Computational Economics, vol. 6 (Dordrecht, Boston,
London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 249–269, 252.
56 Andreas Diekmann, “Soziale Dilemmata: Modelle, Typisierungen und empirische
Resultate,” in Hans-Jürgen Andreß et al., eds., Theorie, Daten, Methoden: Neue Modelle und
Verfahrensweisen in den Sozialwissenschaften. Theodor Harder zum sechzigsten Geburtstag
(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992), 177–203.
57 Gareth R. Jones, “Transaction Costs, Property Rights, and Organizational Culture: An
Exchange Perspective,” Administrative Science Quarterly 28 (1983), 454–467.