Social Motives in Network Formation: An Experiment

van Dolder, Dennie; Buskens, Vincent

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Social Motives in Network Formation: An Experiment

International Conference on Game Theory for Networks, pp. 593-602, 2009

10 Pages Posted: 23 Oct 2009 Last revised: 14 Oct 2017

See all articles by Dennie van Dolder

Dennie van Dolder

University of Essex - Department of Economics

Vincent Buskens

Utrecht University - Department of Sociology/ICS; Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR)

Date Written: May 1, 2009

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.

Keywords: network formation, social motives, experiment

JEL Classification: C92

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

van Dolder, Dennie and Buskens, Vincent and Buskens, Vincent, Social Motives in Network Formation: An Experiment (May 1, 2009). International Conference on Game Theory for Networks, pp. 593-602, 2009, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1492644