Meeting friends of friends and homophily: a complementarity

Adrien Vigier

Economic Theory Bulletin, 2014, vol. 2, issue 1, No 5, 45-52

Abstract: Abstract I explore the effects of homophily on the formation of social networks. When individuals are homophilous, friends of friends are likely to share tastes and hence also likely to form new friendships. In the context of homophily, the social network dynamics of meeting friends of friends thus acts as directed search, and a greater number of meetings result in links being formed. However, since it exacerbates preferential attachment—whereby high degree nodes attract new links—homophily also causes more unequal distributions of links. Thus while homophily normally improves social welfare, for a given average number of links formed it in fact affects welfare negatively.

Keywords: Social networks; Network formation; Homophily (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A14 C71 C72 D85 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1007/s40505-013-0025-1

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