Related papers: Preference or opportunity? Why do we find more fri…

Understanding the forces governing human behavior and social dynamics is a challenging problem. Individuals' decisions and actions are affected by interlaced factors, such as physical location, homophily, and social ties. In this paper, we…

This article develops a class of models called Sender/Receiver Finite Mixture Exponential Random Graph Models (SRFM-ERGMs) that enables inference on networks. This class of models extends the existing Exponential Random Graph Modeling…

This paper examines the interplay between desegregation, institutional bias, and individual behavior in education. Using a game-theoretic model that considers race-heterogeneous social incentives, the study investigates the effects of…

Many online social networks thrive on automatic sharing of friends' activities to a user through activity feeds, which may influence the user's next actions. However, identifying such social influence is tricky because these activities are…

Homophily describes the phenomenon that similarity breeds connection, i.e., individuals tend to form ties with other people who are similar to themselves in some aspect(s). The similarity in music taste can undoubtedly influence who we make…

A prominent threat to causal inference about peer effects over social networks is the presence of homophily bias, that is, social influence between friends and families is entangled with common characteristics or underlying similarities…

We study how a behavior (an idea, buying a product, having a disease, adopting a cultural fad or a technology) spreads among agents in an a social network that exhibits segregation or homophily (the tendency of agents to associate with…

This paper presents a computational procedure for extracting demography data, mining patterns of human preferences, and measuring the topology of a virtual network. The network was created from the personal and relationships data of an…

Homophily can put minority groups at a disadvantage by restricting their ability to establish links with people from a majority group. This can limit the overall visibility of minorities in the network. Building on a Barab\'{a}si-Albert…

This paper develops a peer effect model for count responses under rational expectations. The model accounts for heterogeneity in peer effects across groups based on observed characteristics. Identification is based on the linear model…

One of the best-known models in network science is preferential attachment. In this model, the probability of attaching to a node depends on the degree of all nodes in the population, and thus depends on global information. In many…

More than any other species, humans form social ties to individuals who are neither kin nor mates, and these ties tend to be with similar people. Here, we show that this similarity extends to genotypes. Across the whole genome, friends'…

With the widespread use of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for representation learning from network data, the fairness of GNN models has raised great attention lately. Fair GNNs aim to ensure that node representations can be accurately…

Homophily refers to the tendency of individuals to associate with others who are similar to them in characteristics, such as, race, ethnicity, age, gender, or interests. In this paper, we investigate if individuals exhibit racial homophily…

Homophily principle, \ie{} nodes with the same labels or similar attributes are more likely to be connected, has been commonly believed to be the main reason for the superiority of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) over traditional Neural…

Segregation is widespread in all realms of human society. Several influential studies have argued that intolerance is not a prerequisite for a segregated society, and that segregation can arise even when people generally prefer diversity.…

An evolutionary model for emergence of diversity in language is developed. We investigated the effects of two real life observations, namely, people prefer people that they communicate with well, and people interact with people that are…

Networks are often characterized by node heterogeneity for which nodes exhibit different degrees of interaction and link homophily for which nodes sharing common features tend to associate with each other. In this paper, we propose a new…

We seek to understand when heterogeneity in user preferences yields improved outcomes in terms of overall cost. That this might be hoped for is based on the common belief that diversity is advantageous in many settings. We investigate this…

I discuss economic and social sources of inequality and elaborate on the role of social networks in inequality, economic immobility, and economic inefficiencies. The lens of social networks clarifies how the entanglement of people's…