The role of unobservable characteristics in friendship network formation

Pablo Brañas-Garza, Lorenzo Ductor and Jaromir Kovarik ()
Additional contact information
Jaromir Kovarik: ‡Universidad del País Vasco UPV/EHU and University of West Bohemia

No 22/08, ThE Papers from Department of Economic Theory and Economic History of the University of Granada.

Abstract: Inbreeding homophily is a prevalent feature of human social networks with important individual and group-level social, economic, and health consequences. The literature has proposed an overwhelming number of dimensions along which human relationships might sort, without proposing a unified empirically-grounded framework for their categorization. We exploit rich data on a sample of University freshmen with very similar characteristic - age, race and education- and contrast the relative importance of observable vs. unobservables characteristics in their friendship formation. We employ Bayesian Model Averaging, a methodology explicitly designed to target model uncertainty and to assess the robustness of each candidate attribute while predicting friendships. We show that, while observable features such as assignment of students to sections, gender, and smoking are robust key determinants of whether two individuals befriend each other, unobservable attributes, such as personality, cognitive abilities, economic preferences, or socio-economic aspects, are largely sensible to the model specification, and are not important predictors of friendships.

Keywords: editorial boards; journals; concentration; power; busyness; innovation; impact (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D8 D85 J16 J7 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2022-07-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv, nep-net and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ugr.es/~teoriahe/RePEc/gra/wpaper/thepapers22_08.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The role of unobservable characteristics in friendship network formation (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gra:wpaper:22/08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ThE Papers from Department of Economic Theory and Economic History of the University of Granada. Campus Universitario de Cartuja. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Angel Solano Garcia. ().