 Social networks and experienced inequalitySai Madhurika Mamunuru, Anand Shrivastava and Arjun Jayadev Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2025, vol. 229, issue C Abstract: Traditional measures of inequality, such as the Gini coefficient, involve pairwise comparisons across all members of a given population. But, most people possess information about, and therefore experience inequality in comparison to, only a subset of the population. In this paper, we provide simple axioms to describe inequality as experienced in social networks. We propose an index to measure aggregate experienced inequality that is consistent with these axioms. We then compute the Gini coefficient and ‘experienced inequality’ in 75 villages in Karnataka, India. We show that for a given wealth distribution, the social network could either accentuate or diminish experienced inequality. We show, first analytically and then empirically, how this can happen with respect to two network properties. Firstly, wealth-based homophily is negatively associated with experienced inequality. Secondly, caste-based homophily is negatively associated with experienced inequality when within-caste inequality is less than the overall Gini coefficient (and positively associated when the opposite is true). Keywords: Wealth inequality; Gini coefficient; Social networks; Homophily (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:229:y:2025:i:c:s016726812400413x DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2024.106799 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D. More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier |
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