Behavioral Communities and the Atomic Structure of Networks
Abstract
When people prefer to coordinate their behaviors with their friends -- e.g., choosing whether to adopt a new technology, to protest against a government, to attend university -- divisions within a social network can sustain different behaviors in different parts of the network. We define a society's `behavioral communities' via its network's `atoms': groups of people who adopt the same behavior in every equilibrium. We analyze how the atoms change with the intensity of the peer effects, and characterize the atoms in a prominent class of network models. We show that using knowledge of atoms to seed the diffusion of a behavior significantly increases diffusion compared to seeding based on standard community detection algorithms. We also show how to use observed behaviors to estimate the intensity of peer effects.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1710.04656,
title = {Behavioral Communities and the Atomic Structure of Networks},
author = {Matthew O. Jackson and Evan C. Storms},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.04656},
year = {2023}
}