Privacy, Trust and Social Network Formation

Alexia Gaudeul and Caterina Giannetti

No 2015-023, Jena Economics Research Papers from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena

Abstract: We study in the laboratory the impact of private information revelation on the selection of partners when forming individual networks. Our experiment combines a "network game" and a "public-good game". In the network game, individuals decide with whom to form a link with, while in the public-good game they decide whether or not to contribute. The variations in our treatments allow us to identify the effect of revealing one's name on the probability of link formation. Our main result suggests that privacy mechanisms affect partner selection and the consequent structure of the network: when individuals reveal their real name, their individual networks are smaller but their profits are higher. This indicates that the privacy costs of revealing personal information are compensated by more productive links.

Keywords: privacy; social networks; public goods; trust (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D85 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-ict, nep-net, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://oweb.b67.uni-jena.de/Papers/jerp2015/wp_2015_023.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Privacy, trust and social network formation (2015)
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:jrp:jrpwrp:2015-023

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Jena Economics Research Papers from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Markus Pasche ().