Related papers: Referral Hiring and Social Network Structure
I study labor markets in which firms hire via referrals. I develop an employment model showing that--despite initial equality in ability, employment, wages, and network structure--minorities receive fewer jobs through referral and lower…
Professional networks are a key determinant of individuals' labor market outcomes. They may also play a role in either exacerbating or ameliorating inequality of opportunity across demographic groups. In a theoretical model of professional…
This paper develops strategic foundations for an important statistical model of random networks with heterogeneous expected degrees. Based on this, we show how social networking services that subtly alter the costs and indirect benefits of…
As modern social networks allow for faster and broader interactions with friends and acquaintances, online referral programs that promote sales through existing users are becoming increasingly popular. Because it is all too common that…
Collaboration networks provide a method for examining the highly heterogeneous structure of collaborative communities. However, we still have limited theoretical understanding of how individual heterogeneity relates to network…
Social networks affect the diffusion of information, and thus have the potential to reduce or amplify inequality in access to opportunity. We show empirically that social networks often exhibit a much larger potential for unequal diffusion…
We study the consequences of job markets' heavy reliance on referrals. Referrals lead to more opportunities for workers to be hired, which lead to better matches and increased productivity, but also disadvantage job-seekers with few or no…
Research in network science has shown that many naturally occurring and technologically constructed networks are scale free, that means a power law degree distribution emerges from a growth model in which each new node attaches to the…
Despite the structural properties of online social networks have attracted much attention, the properties of the close-knit friendship structures remain an important question. Here, we mainly focus on how these mesoscale structures are…
The friendship paradox is a sociological phenomenon stating that most people have fewer friends than their friends do. The generalized friendship paradox refers to the same observation for attributes other than degree, and it has been…
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…
Our friends have more friends than we do. That is the basis of the friendship paradox. In mathematical terms, the mean number of friends of friends is higher than the mean number of friends. In the present study, we analyzed the…
The probability distribution of number of ties of an individual in a social network follows a scale-free power-law. However, how this distribution arises has not been conclusively demonstrated in direct analyses of people's actions in…
Social network structure is very important for understanding human information diffusing, cooperating and competing patterns. It can bring us with some deep insights about how people affect each other. As a part of complex networks, social…
The friendship paradox refers to the sociological observation that, while the people's assessment of their own popularity is typically self-aggrandizing, in reality they are less popular than their friends. The generalized friendship…
Innovation is fundamental for development and provides a competitive advantage for societies. It is the process of creating more complex technologies, ideas, or protocols from existing ones. While innovation may be created by single agents…
The design of mechanisms that encourage pro-social behaviours in populations of self-regarding agents is recognised as a major theoretical challenge within several areas of social, life and engineering sciences. When interference from…
Faculty hiring networks-who hires whose graduates as faculty-exhibit steep hierarchies, which can reinforce both social and epistemic inequalities in academia. Understanding the mechanisms driving these patterns would inform efforts to…
The friendship paradox is the phenomenon that in social networks, people on average have fewer friends than their friends do. The generalized friendship paradox is an extension to attributes other than the number of friends. The friendship…
The friendship paradox is revisited by considering both local and global averages of friends. How the economics of attention affects the recruitment of friends is examined. Statistical implications of varying individual attentions are…