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Full-Text Articles in Models and Methods

The Coevolution Of Networks And Political Attitudes, David Lazer, Brian Rubineau, Carol Chetkovich, Nancy Katz, Michael Neblo Jan 2009

The Coevolution Of Networks And Political Attitudes, David Lazer, Brian Rubineau, Carol Chetkovich, Nancy Katz, Michael Neblo

Working Papers

How do attitudes and social affiliations co-evolve? A long stream of research has focused on the relationship between attitudes and social affiliations. However, in most of this research the causal relationship between views and affiliations is difficult to discern definitively: Do people influence each other’s views so that they converge over time or do they primarily affiliate (by choice or happenstance) with those of similar views? Here we use longitudinal attitudinal and whole network data collected at critical times (notably, at the inception of the system) to identify robustly the determinants of attitudes and affiliations. We find significant conformity tendencies: …


Connected Coordination: Network Structure And Group Coordination, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Ramamohan Paturi, Nicholas Weller Jan 2009

Connected Coordination: Network Structure And Group Coordination, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Ramamohan Paturi, Nicholas Weller

Faculty Scholarship

Networks can affect a group’s ability to solve a coordination problem. We utilize laboratory experiments to study the conditions under which groups of subjects can solve coordination games. We investigate a variety of different network structures, and we also investigate coordination games with symmetric and asymmetric payoffs. Our results show that network connections facilitate coordination in both symmetric and asymmetric games. Most significantly, we find that increases in the number of network connections encourage coordination even when payoffs are highly asymmetric. These results shed light on the conditions that may facilitate coordination in real-world networks.