A Structural Modeling Approach for Network Formation and Social Interactions — with Applications to Students' Friendship Choices and Selectivity on Activities
2013/01/22
研討會日期 : 2013-01-22
時間 : 21:00
主講人 : Mr. Chih-Sheng Hsieh
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Chih-Sheng Hsieh is going to receive his Ph.D. in Economics from The Ohio State University in 2013. His research field is in applied econometrics, labor, health and social economics. He is applying for the position of the Institute of Economics, AS right now.
演講摘要 : In this paper, we propose a structural modeling approach for both network formation and social interactions. To embed the concept of strategic decisions into the model, we motivate the model specification by an economic game in which individuals choose friendship links and economic activities with interactions. By allowing individuals to respond to economic incentives stemming from friend interactions on certain activities when making friendship decisions, our structural setting generates the following two advantages: first, one can evaluate the importance of economic incentives from certain interactions when individuals choose their friends; second, the possible friendship selection bias in interaction outcomes will be corrected when the network formation is explicitly modeled. The proposed model is applied to American high school students' friendship networks in the Add Health dataset. From two activity outcomes that are considered in the paper, students' GPAs and smoking frequencies, we find a significant economic incentive effect from GPA, but not from smoking, on friendship formation. These results suggest that the benefit of interactions from academic learning is an important factor for forming friendships, while the joy of smoking together is not. However, from the perspective of social interactions, outcomes of both GPA and smoking frequency are subject to significant positive peer effects.
