Friend-Based Ranking
Social and Information Networks
2020-09-29 v6 Computer Science and Game Theory
Physics and Society
Abstract
We analyze the design of a mechanism to extract a ranking of individuals according to a unidimensional characteristic, such as ability or need. Individuals, connected on a social network, only have local information about the ranking. We show that a planner can construct an ex post incentive compatible and efficient mechanism if and only if every pair of friends has a friend in common. We characterize the windmill network as the sparsest social network for which the planner can always construct a complete ranking.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1807.05093,
title = {Friend-Based Ranking},
author = {Francis Bloch and Matthew Olckers},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.05093},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
final version for publication at AEJ: Micro