Influential listeners: An experiment on persuasion bias in social networks

Luca Corazzini, Filippo Pavesi, Beatrice Petrovich and Luca Stanca

European Economic Review, 2012, vol. 56, issue 6, 1276-1288

Abstract: This paper presents an experimental investigation of persuasion bias, a form of bounded rationality whereby agents communicating through a social network are unable to account for repetitions in the information they receive. We find that, after repeated communication within a social network, social influence depends not only on being listened to by many others, but also on listening to many others. We show that persuasion bias can be viewed as an extreme case of a generalized boundedly rational updating rule in which agents receive more or less attention depending on how many other agents they listen to. The results indicate that behavior in the experiment is consistent with an updating rule according to which agents' social influence is proportional to their indegree.

Keywords: Social networks; Learning; Social influence; Persuasion bias; Bounded rationality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A14 D83 D85 L14 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (52)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292112000670
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Influential Listeners: An Experiment on Persuasion Bias in Social Networks (2010)
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:eee:eecrev:v:56:y:2012:i:6:p:1276-1288

DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2012.05.005

Access Statistics for this article

European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer

More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().