Social motives in network formation: an experiment

van Dolder, Dennie; Buskens, Vincent

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.

• Conference Name: 2009 International Conference on Game Theory for Networks (GameNets 2009)
• End Date: May 15, 2009
• Acceptance Date: May 1, 2009
• Publication Date: May 1, 2009
• Deposit Date: Apr 25, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 25, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/705367
• Additional Information: Published in: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Game Theory for Networks: 13-15 May, 2009, Boaziçi University, Istanbul. [Piscataway, N.J.] : IEEE, c2009. ISBN 9781424441761 pp. 593-602. DOI:10.1109/GAMENETS.2009.5137449; doi: 10.1109/GAMENETS.2009.5137449; ; ; "©2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works."