Estimating peer effects in networks with peer encouragement designs

Estimating peer effects in networks with peer encouragement designs.

Peer effects, in which the behavior of an individual is affected by the behavior of their peers, are central to social science. Because peer effects are often confounded with homophily and common external causes, recent work has used randomized experiments to estimate effects of specific peer behaviors. These experiments have often relied on the experimenter being able to randomly modulate mech...

Supporting information for “Estimating peer effects in networks with peer encouragement designs”

Estimating Peer Effects on Health in Social Networks

We recently showed that obesity can spread socially from person to person in adults (Christakis and Fowler 2007). A natural question to ask is whether or not these results generalize to a population of adolescents. Three separate teams of researchers have analyzed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and shown evidence of person-to-peron spread of obesity, but they ...

Peer Selection in Peer-to-Peer Networks with Semantic Topologies

Peer-to-Peer systems have proven to be an effective way of sharing data. Modern protocols are able to efficiently route a message to a given peer. However, determining the destination peer in the first place is not always trivial. We propose a model in which peers advertise their expertise in the Peer-to-Peer network. The knowledge about the expertise of other peers forms a semantic topology. B...

Peer effects in endogenous networks

This paper presents a simple model of strategic network formation with local complementarities in e ort levels and positive local externalities. Equilibrium networks display other than the complete and the empty network a core-periphery structure, which is commonly observed in empirical studies. Ex-ante homogenous agents may obtain very di erent ex-post outcomes. These ndings are relevant for a...