We examine how three different communication processes operating through social networks are affected by homophily - the tendency of individuals to associate with others similar to themselves. Homophily has no effect if messages are broadcast or sent via shortest paths; only connection density...

We study learning and influence in a setting where agents communicate according to an arbitrary social network and naïvely update their beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of their neighbors’ opinions. A focus is on conditions under which beliefs of all agents in large societies...

The explosion in online social networks motivates an enquiry into their structure and their welfare effects. A central feature of these networks is information sharing: online social networks lower the cost of getting information from others. These lower costs affect the attractiveness of...

We study a dynamic model of opinion formation in social networks. In our model, boundedly rational agents update opinions by averaging over their neighbors' expressed opinions, but may misrepresent their own opinion by conforming or counter-conforming with their neighbors. We show that an...

We investigate the role of manipulation in a model of opinion formation. Agents repeatedly communicate with their neighbors in the social network, can exert effort to manipulate the trust of others, and update their opinions about some common issue by taking weighted averages of neighbors'...

This paper studies whether conformism behavior affects individual outcomes in crime. We present a social network model of peer effects with ex-ante heterogeneous agents and show how conformism and deterrence affect criminal activities. We then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed...

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 tend to be concentrated within the same group. This...

Which types of networks favor the diffusion of innovations in the sense that an innovation whose intrinsic benefits are greater than those of an established choice will be able to replace the latter when it is initially used only by a small fraction of a large population? For deterministic and...

This paper models the dynamic process through which a large society may succeed in building up its “social capital” by establishing a stable and dense pattern of interaction among its members. In the model, agents interact according to a collection of infinitely repeated Prisoner’s...

The paper studies the impact of homophily on the optimal strategies of a monopolist, whose marketing campaign of new product relies on a word of mouth communication. Homophily is a tendency of people to interact more with those who are similar to them. In the model there are two types of...