College Financial Homework

The idea is to figure out the links among Boards of Directors in corporate America. Executive pay is clearly out of control and the people who should reign it in are the boards of directors. Problem is, many board members are executives in other companies whose board members run other companies. This leads to an "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" scenario where boards approve high exec salaries and perks because those well paid execs sit on their companies boards.

So, class, your assignment is to write a web spider to crawl through corporate America's websites and collect the names of execs and board members and build a multi-node graph that, er, connects the dots. Seeing how interbred the companies are should shed some interesting light on this problem.