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on Network Economics |
| By: | Horrace, William (Syracuse University); Jung, Hyunseok (University of Arkansas); Presler, Jonathan (Sinquefield Center for Applied Economic Research, Saint Louis University); Schwartz, Amy Ellen (Syracuse University) |
| Abstract: | We identify and estimate the effects of student-level social spillovers on standardized test performance in New York City (NYC) elementary schools. We leverage student demographic data to construct within-classroom social networks based on shared student characteristics, such as a gender or ethnicity. Rather than aggregate shared characteristics into a single network matrix, we specify additively separate network matrices for each shared characteristic and estimate city-wide peer effects for each one. Conditional on sharing a classroom, we find that the most important student peer effects are shared ethnicity, gender, and primary language spoken at home. Identification of the model is discussed. |
| Keywords: | Peer effect; Network; Homophily; Education |
| JEL: | C31 I21 |
| Date: | 2021–10–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:sluecr:2021_004&r= |
| By: | Atayev, Atabek; Janssen, Maarten C. W. |
| Abstract: | Consumers can acquire information through their own search efforts or through their social network. Information diffusion via word-of-mouth communication leads to some consumers free-riding on their 'friends' and less information acquisition via active search. Free-riding also has an important positive effect, however, in that consumers that do not actively search themselves are more likely to be able to compare prices before purchase, imposing competitive pressure on firms. We show how market prices depend on the characteristics of the network and on search cost. For example, if the search cost becomes small, price dispersion disappears, while the price level converges to the monopoly level, implying that expected prices are decreasing for small enough search cost. More connected societies have lower market prices, while price dispersion remains even in fully connected societies. |
| Keywords: | Consumer Search,Word-of-Mouth Communication,Social Networks |
| JEL: | D43 D83 D85 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:21091&r= |
| By: | Piyush Panigrahi |
| Abstract: | Larger Indian firms selling inputs to other firms tend to have more customers, tend to be used more intensively by their customers, and tend to have larger customers. Motivated by these regularities, I propose a novel empirical model of trade featuring endogenous formation of input-output linkages between spatially distant firms. The empirical model consists of (a) a theoretical framework that accommodates first order features of firm-to-firm network data, (b) a maximum likelihood framework for structural estimation that is uninhibited by the scale of data, and (c) a procedure for counterfactual analysis that speaks to the effects of micro- and macroshocks to the spatial network economy. In the model, firms with low production costs end up larger because they find more customers, are used more intensively by their customers and in turn their customers lower production costs and end up larger themselves. The model is estimated using novel micro-data on firm-to-firm sales between Indian firms. The estimated model implies that a 10% decline in inter-state border frictions in India leads to welfare gains ranging between 1% and 8% across districts. Moreover, over half of the variation in changes in firms’ sales to other firms can be explained by endogenous changes in the network structure. |
| Keywords: | production networks, international trade, economic geography |
| JEL: | F11 F12 D24 C67 C68 L11 O11 O12 R12 R15 D85 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9466&r= |
| By: | Atayev, Atabek |
| Abstract: | In markets with search frictions, consumers can acquire information about goods either through costly search or from friends via word-of-mouth (WOM) communication. How do sellers' market power react to a very large increase in the number of consumers' friends with whom they engage in WOM? The answer to the question depends on whether consumers are freely endowed with price information. If acquiring price quotes is costly, equilibrium prices are dispersed and the expected price is higher than the marginal cost of production. This implies that firms retain market power even if price information is disseminated among a very large number of consumers due to technological progress, such as social networking websites. |
| Keywords: | Consumer Search,Word-of-Mouth Communication,Social Networks |
| JEL: | D43 D83 D85 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:21090&r= |
| By: | Wanying Huang; Philipp Strack; Omer Tamuz |
| Abstract: | We study how long-lived, rational, exponentially discounting agents learn in a social network. In every period, each agent observes the past actions of his neighbors, receives a private signal, and chooses an action with the objective of matching the state. Since agents behave strategically, and since their actions depend on higher order beliefs, it is difficult to characterize equilibrium behavior. Nevertheless, we show that regardless of the size and shape of the network, and the patience of the agents, the equilibrium speed of learning is bounded by a constant that only depends on the private signal distribution. |
| Date: | 2021–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2112.14265&r= |
| By: | Ozan Isler; Simon Gaechter |
| Abstract: | Peer observation can influence social norm perceptions as well as behavior in various moral domains, but is the tendency to be influenced by and conform with peers domain-general? In an online experiment (N = 815), we studied peer effects in honesty and cooperation and tested the individual-level links between these two moral domains. Participants completed both honesty and cooperation tasks after observing their peers. Consistent with the literature, separate analysis of the two domains indicated both negative and positive peer influences in honesty and in cooperation, with negative influences tending to be stronger. Behavioral tests linking the two domains at the individual-level revealed that cooperative participants were also more honest—a link that was associated with low Machiavellianism scores. While standard personality trait measures showed no links between the two domains in the tendency to conform, individual-level tests suggested that conformism is a domain-general behavioral trait observed across honesty and cooperation. Based on these findings, we discuss the potential of and difficulties in using peer observation to influence social norm compliance as an avenue for further research and as a tool to promote social welfare. |
| Keywords: | honesty, cooperation, peer influence, conformism, social norms |
| JEL: | C91 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9493&r= |
| By: | Yu Zhao; Huaming Du; Ying Liu; Shaopeng Wei; Xingyan Chen; Huali Feng; Qinghong Shuai; Qing Li; Fuzhen Zhuang; Gang Kou |
| Abstract: | Stock Movement Prediction (SMP) aims at predicting listed companies' stock future price trend, which is a challenging task due to the volatile nature of financial markets. Recent financial studies show that the momentum spillover effect plays a significant role in stock fluctuation. However, previous studies typically only learn the simple connection information among related companies, which inevitably fail to model complex relations of listed companies in the real financial market. To address this issue, we first construct a more comprehensive Market Knowledge Graph (MKG) which contains bi-typed entities including listed companies and their associated executives, and hybrid-relations including the explicit relations and implicit relations. Afterward, we propose DanSmp, a novel Dual Attention Networks to learn the momentum spillover signals based upon the constructed MKG for stock prediction. The empirical experiments on our constructed datasets against nine SOTA baselines demonstrate that the proposed DanSmp is capable of improving stock prediction with the constructed MKG. |
| Date: | 2022–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2201.04965&r= |
| By: | Debnath, R.; Bardhan, R.; Mohaddes, K.; Shah, D. U.; Ramage, M. H.; Alvarez, R. M. |
| Abstract: | There is a growing consensus among policymakers that we need a human-centric low-carbon transition. There are few studies on how to do it effectively, especially in the context of emissions reduction in the building sector. It is critical to investigate public sentiment and attitudes towards this aspect of climate action, as the building and construction sector accounts for 40% of global carbon emissions. Our methodology involves a multi-method approach, using a data-driven exploration of public sentiment using 256,717 tweets containing #emission and #building between 2009 - 2021. Using graph theory-led metrics, a network topology-based investigation of hashtag co-occurrences was used to extract highly influential hashtags. Our results show that public sentiment is reactive to global climate policy events. Between 2009-2012, #greenbuilding, #emissions were highly influential, shaping the public discourse towards climate action. In 2013-2016, #lowcarbon, #construction and #energyefficiency had high centrality scores, which were replaced by hashtags like #climatetec, #netzero, #climateaction, #circulareconomy, and #masstimber, #climatejustice in 2017-2021. Results suggest that the current building emission reduction context emphasises the social and environmental justice dimensions, which is pivotal to an effective people-centric policymaking. |
| Keywords: | Emission, climate change, building, computational social science, people-centric transition, Twitter |
| JEL: | C63 Q54 |
| Date: | 2022–01–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cam:camdae:2202&r= |
| By: | Qi Shi; Dong Hao |
| Abstract: | In a crowdsourcing contest, a requester holding a task posts it to a crowd. People in the crowd then compete with each other to win the rewards. Although in real life, a crowd is usually networked and people influence each other via social ties, existing crowdsourcing contest theories do not aim to answer how interpersonal relationships influence peoples' incentives and behaviors, and thereby affect the crowdsourcing performance. In this work, we novelly take peoples' social ties as a key factor in the modeling and designing of agents' incentives for crowdsourcing contests. We then establish a new contest mechanism by which the requester can impel agents to invite their neighbours to contribute to the task. The mechanism has a simple rule and is very easy for agents to play. According to our equilibrium analysis, in the Bayesian Nash equilibrium agents' behaviors show a vast diversity, capturing that besides the intrinsic ability, the social ties among agents also play a central role for decision-making. After that, we design an effective algorithm to automatically compute the Bayesian Nash equilibrium of the invitation crowdsourcing contest and further adapt it to large graphs. Both theoretical and empirical results show that, the invitation crowdsourcing contest can substantially enlarge the number of contributors, whereby the requester can obtain significantly better solutions without a large advertisement expenditure. |
| Date: | 2021–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2112.02884&r= |