 How Homophily Affects Learning and Diffusion in NetworksBenjamin Golub and Matthew Jackson No 2009.35, Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Abstract: We examine how three different communication processes operating through social networks are affected by homophily - the tendency of individuals to associate with others similar to themselves. Homophily has no effect if messages are broadcast or sent via shortest paths; only connection density matters. In contrast, homophily substantially slows learning based on repeated averaging of neighbors' information and Markovian diffusion processes such as the Google random surfer model. Indeed, the latter processes are strongly affected by homophily but completely independent of connection density, provided this density exceeds a low threshold. We obtain these results by establishing new results on the spectra of large random graphs and relating the spectra to homophily. We conclude by checking the theoretical predictions using observed high school friendship networks from the Adolescent Health dataset. Keywords: Networks; Learning; Diffusion; Homophily; Friendships; Social Networks; Random Graphs; Mixing Time; Convergence; Speed of Learning; Speed of Convergence (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:fem:femwpa:2009.35 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Contact information at EDIRC. |
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