Communication and Coordination in Social Networks

I model people in a coordination game who use a communication network totell each other their willingness to participate. The minimal sufficientnetworks for coordination can be interpreted as placing people into ahierarchy of social roles or "stages": "initial adopters", then "followers", and so on down to "late adopters". A communication network helps coordination in exactly two ways: by informing each stage about earlier stages, and by creating common knowledge within each stage. We then consider two examples: first we show that"low dimensional" networks can be better for coordination eventhough they have far fewer links than "high dimensional" networks;second we show that wide dispersion of "insurgents", peoplepredisposed toward participation, can be good for coordination but too muchdispersion can be bad.     

Awareness,diffusion of information and reasons for adoption of vasectomy: a study of family planning in Bihar

A survey carried out to study problems related to Indian vasectomy camps organized at Patna and Jamue towns had the following major purposes: 1) to determine to what extent vasectomy adopters were aware of the family planning program; 2) to determine advantages perceived of adopting vasectomy; 3) to determine how the adopters became aware of the vasectomy camps; and 4) to determine why adopters chose permanent conception control. 200 adopters from Patna and an equal number from Jamue were selected, based on an accidental sampling technique whereby each adopter was contacted and persuaded to be interviewed. It was found that a majority of the adopters were illiterates. Among advantages listed by adopters, the importance of family planning seemed to be subdued by propensity to better their economic condition. It was seen that the literate adopters have a much higher proportion of awareness of the need for family planning and population control. Concerning diffusion of information, the informal and interpersonal sources were equally effective and conducive for the adopters. More than l/2 of the adopters relied upon information provided by friends. In general, higher levels of education correlate with less influence of friends as communicators. The official sources turned out to be effective for the more highly educated adopters. The following advantages were called out as reasons for vasectomy adoption by adopter : 1) permanence; 2) economical reasons; 3) no reason; or 4) many reasons. Whatever the reasons, it is obvious that vasectomy is gaining momentum gradually and people are becoming aware of the underlying advantages of permanent conception control.     

Adoption of organic farming: Are there differences between early and late adoption?

Based on the fact that not all farmers adopt a technology at the same time, it is argued in this paper that the distinction between groups is important because early, medium and late adopters respond differently to economic and non-economic factors when they consider whether to take up organic farming or not. The individual effects on adoption between the groups are identified by the use of multinomial logit analysis. The results provide evidence that there are significant differences in the characteristics between the adopter groups. The findings also reveal that the factors that affect adoption play a different role for early, medium and late adopters, particularly with regard to farming intensity, age, information gathering as well as attitudes of the farmer. More specifically, early adopters were the youngest to adopt organic farming and their decisions were found to be less profit related compared to other groups. Late adoption is constrained by risk considerations, while environmental attitudes and social learning were identified to be important determinants for all adopter groups. Overall, the findings strongly suggest, that for policy measures to be effective, the current state of diffusion has to be taken into account.     

Identification of effective opinion leaders in the diffusion of technological innovation: A social network approach

Opinion leaders are the people in a social network who have the greatest influence on other people's acknowledgment or adoption of products/services in the diffusion process of technological innovation. In this research, we investigate which opinion leader is the best marketing choice in terms of diffusion speed and maximum cumulative number of adopters, using a social network approach and threshold model. On the basis of the simulation result, we find that opinion leaders with high sociality are the best ones for fast diffusion, whereas those with high distance centrality are the best ones for the maximum cumulative number of adopters. Moreover, we conclude that the characteristics of effective opinion leaders selected as initial adopters could vary depending on the characteristics of the social network and type of innovation. Finally, we find that opinion leaders affect the diffusion process only when the percentage of initial adopters reaches a critical mass.     

THE PATH OF TECHNOLOGY DIFFUSION: WHICH NEIGHBORS TO LEARN FROM?

This study uses a panel data set of 25 years over 280 districts in rural India and applies a geographic information systems (GIS) program to investigate the regional neighborhood effect on the rate of diffusion of new technologies. The results show that in the technology diffusion process, the early successful adopters have a larger effect on neighboring adopters than do the early unsuccessful adopters. Hence, use of the aggregate or the simple average of adoption rate among neighborhoods as a proxy for the neighborhood effect, a common practice in the learning literature, may be inappropriate. We also find that education and irrigation play important roles in facilitating technology diffusion.     

TRUST,VALUES, AND FALSE CONSENSUS

Individuals’ beliefs about the trustworthiness of a generic member of the population are both heterogeneous across individuals and persistent across generations. We investigate one mechanism yielding these dual patterns: false consensus. In the context of a trust game experiment, we show that the relationship between behavior and beliefs is consistent with individuals extrapolating their trust beliefs from their own trustworthiness and that this tendency continues even after substantial learning opportunities. We go on to provide evidence suggesting that one's own trustworthiness can be traced back to the values parents transmit to their children during their upbringing.     

Agri-environmental policies in the EU and United States: A comparison

Agri-environmental policies (AEPs) in the United States and the European Union are examples of payments for environmental services that pay farmers to reduce the negative externalities of agricultural production, while serving as a means to transfer public funds to farmers. We show that despite similar origins, AEPs in the two regions differ both in their specific objectives and in their implementation. For example, AEPs in most member states of the EU-15 have the additional objective of using agriculture as a driver for rural development. This objective is achieved by compensating farmers for the private delivery of positive public goods, such as attractive landscapes, produced by agriculture. The rationale is market failure, and there is empirical evidence that Europeans are willing to pay for such positive externalities. No comparable provision exists in U.S. policy. By contrast, U.S. AEPs focus almost entirely on reducing agriculture's negative externalities, such as soil erosion. Second, we find that U.S. programs are more targeted than their EU counterparts, and take opportunity cost into account. The EU programs, on the other hand, address a wider range of externalities, and are focused more on the paying for a particular farming process than reducing specific negative externalities. The EU takes a broader view of AEPs than does the United States, both in terms of type of activity that can be funded, and by using less targeting by land characteristics, and so the European program could be more easily used as a mechanism for transferring income to producers. Despite this, we find evidence that many of the amenities targeted by the programs are demanded by the population.     

MARRIAGE,DIVORCE, AND ASYMMETRIC INFORMATION

We use data on people's valuations of options outside marriage and beliefs about spouses' options. The data demonstrate that, in some couples, one spouse would be happier and the other spouse unhappier outside of some marriages, suggesting that bargaining takes place and that spouses have private information. We estimate a bargaining model with interdependent utility that quantifies the resulting inefficiencies. Our results show that people forgo some utility in order to make their spouses better off and, in doing so, offset much of the inefficiency generated by their imperfect knowledge. Thus, we find evidence of asymmetric information and interdependent utility in marriage.     

Social memory,evidence, and conflict

This paper examines an equilibrium model of social memory — a society's vicarious beliefs about its past. We show that incorrect social memory is a key ingredient in creating and perpetuating destructive conflicts.We analyze an infinite-horizon model in which two countries face off each period in a game of conflict characterized by the possibility of mutually destructive “all out war” that yields catastrophic consequences for both sides. Each country is inhabited by a dynastic sequence of individuals. Each individual cares about future individuals in the same country, and can communicate with the next generation of their countrymen using private messages. Social memory is based on these messages, and on physical evidence — a sequence of imperfectly informative public signals of past behavior. We find that if the future is sufficiently important for all individuals, then regardless of the precision of physical evidence from the past there is an equilibrium in which the two countries engage in all out war with arbitrarily high frequency, an outcome that cannot arise in the standard repeated game. In our construction, each new generation “repeats the mistakes” of its predecessors, leading to an endless cycle of destructive behavior.Surprisingly, we find that degrading the quality of information that individuals have about current decisions may “improve” social memory. This in turn ensures that arbitrarily frequent all out wars cannot occur.     

Does the sophistication of use of unemployment insurance evolve with experience?

Abstract The subject of this paper is the repeat use of UI/EI benefits in Canada. The first objective is to investigate empirically the pattern of adjustment that UI users exhibit over a multiple claim horizon. Our secondary objective is to investigate a behavioural channel that might potentially underlie observed adjustment effects, namely, individual learning effects. We estimate an econometric model of how certain features of their claims change as they file subsequent claims. We find strong empirical patterns suggesting that there does appear to be some sort of an adjustment process; beneficiaries tend to approach a desired value for these particular facets of their UI claims. There appears to be some process of growing sophistication of UI use – which some might label ‘gaming the system’– reflecting the adjustment of claims and the concomitant employment patterns to the provisions and rules of the regime. We also uncover evidence in favour of the existence of individual learning effects.