Social motives in network formation: An experiment

Dennie Van Dolder; Vincent  Buskens

1st International Conference on Game Theory for Networks

Research Article

Social motives in network formation: An experiment

Cite: BibTeX Plain Text

@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/GAMENETS.2009.5137449,
    author={Dennie Van Dolder  and Vincent  Buskens},
    title={Social motives in network formation: An experiment},
    proceedings={1st International Conference on Game Theory for Networks},
    publisher={IEEE},
    proceedings_a={GAMENETS},
    year={2009},
    month={6},
    keywords={},
    doi={10.1109/GAMENETS.2009.5137449}
}

Dennie Van Dolder
Vincent Buskens
Year: 2009
Social motives in network formation: An experiment
GAMENETS
IEEE
DOI: 10.1109/GAMENETS.2009.5137449

Dennie Van Dolder ¹^,*, Vincent Buskens²^,*

1: Nottingham School of Economics, University of Nottingham.
2: Department of Sociology / ICS, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 2, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

*Contact email: d.vandolder@gmail.com, v.buskens@uu.nl

Abstract

Literature on network formation typically assumes that people create and remove relations as to maximize their outcome in the network. It is mostly neglected that people might also care about the outcomes of others when creating and removing links. In the current paper, we develop an experiment to investigate whether people show preferences that involve the outcomes of others during network formation. We find varying evidence for effects of social motives in the settings we compare in the experiment. In the final part of the paper, we discuss some explanations for these findings.

Published: 2009-06-26
Publisher: IEEE

: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/GAMENETS.2009.5137449