How individual characteristics shape the structure of social networks

Yann Girard (), Florian Hett and Daniel Schunk
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Yann Girard: GSEFM, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany

No 1414, Working Papers from Gutenberg School of Management and Economics, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Abstract: We study how students’ social networks emerge by documenting systematic patterns in the process of friendship formation of incoming students; these students all start out in a new environment and thus jointly create a new social network. As a specific novelty, we consider cooperativeness, time and risk preferences - elicited experimentally - together with factors like socioeconomic and personality characteristics. We find a number of robust predictors of link formation and of the position within the social network (local and global network centrality). In particular, cooperativeness has a complex association with link formation. We also find evidence for homophily along several dimensions. Finally, our results show that despite these systematic patterns, social network structures can be exogenously manipulated, as we find that random assignments of students to groups on the first two days of university impacts the students’ friendship formation process.

Keywords: Social networks; education; link formation; homophily; cooperation; field and lab data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D85 I25 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2014-11-17, Revised 2014-11-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-neu, nep-soc and nep-ure
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https://download.uni-mainz.de/RePEc/pdf/Discussion_Paper_1414.pdf First version, 2014 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: How individual characteristics shape the structure of social networks (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jgu:wpaper:1414

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