Related papers: A Network-Based Explanation of Inequality Percepti…
The usual definitions of algorithmic fairness focus on population-level statistics, such as demographic parity or equal opportunity. However, in many social or economic contexts, fairness is not perceived globally, but locally, through an…
People's perceptions about the size of minority groups in social networks can be biased, often showing systematic over- or underestimation. These social perception biases are often attributed to biased cognitive or motivational processes.…
Social networks amplify inequalities due to fundamental mechanisms of social tie formation such as homophily and triadic closure. These forces sharpen social segregation reflected in network fragmentation. Yet, little is known about what…
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…
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…
Much of social network analysis is - implicitly or explicitly - predicated on the assumption that individuals tend to be more similar to their friends than to strangers. Thus, an observed social network provides a noisy signal about the…
Recent genomic and bioinformatic advances have motivated the development of numerous random network models purporting to describe graphs of biological, technological, and sociological origin. The success of a model has been evaluated by how…
Professional networks -- the social networks among people in a given line of work -- can serve as a conduit for job prospects and other opportunities. Here we propose a model for the formation of such networks and the transfer of…
The uneven distribution of wealth and individual economic capacities are among the main forces which shape modern societies and arguably bias the emerging social structures. However, the study of correlations between the social network and…
Network Creation Games are an important framework for understanding the formation of real-world networks. These games usually assume a set of indistinguishable agents strategically buying edges at a uniform price leading to a network among…
In human societies, people's willingness to compete and strive for better social status as well as being envious of those perceived in some way superior lead to social structures that are intrinsically hierarchical. Here we propose an…
The nexus between debt and inequality has attracted considerable scholarly attention in the wake of the global financial crisis. One prominent candidate to explain the striking co-evolution of income inequality and private debt in this…
Many existing statistical and machine learning tools for social network analysis focus on a single level of analysis. Methods designed for clustering optimize a global partition of the graph, whereas projection based approaches (e.g. the…
Social influence cannot be identified from purely observational data on social networks, because such influence is generically confounded with latent homophily, i.e., with a node's network partners being informative about the node's…
We propose an equilibrium interaction model of occupational segregation and labor market inequality between two social groups, generated exclusively through the documented tendency to refer informal job seekers of identical "social color".…
The past analyses of datasets of social networks have enabled us to make empirical findings of a number of aspects of human society, which are commonly featured as stylized facts of social networks, such as broad distributions of network…
Social media has transformed global communication, yet its network structure can systematically distort perceptions through effects like the majority illusion and echo chambers. We introduce the perception gap index, a graph-based measure…
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…
Income inequality and redistribution policies are modeled with a minimal, endogenous model of a simple foraging economy. Significant income inequalities emerge from the model for populations of equally capable individuals presented with…
Our societies are heterogeneous in many dimensions such as census, education, religion, ethnic and cultural composition. The links between individuals - e.g. by friendship, marriage or collaboration - are not evenly distributed, but rather…