Behavioral Communities and the Atomic Structure of Networks

Abstract

When people prefer to coordinate their behaviors with their friends---e.g., choosing whether to adopt a new technology, to protest against a government, to attend university---divisions within a social network can sustain different behaviors in different parts of the network. We define a society's `behavioral communities' via its network's `atoms': groups of people who adopt the same behavior in every equilibrium. We analyze how the atoms change with the intensity of the peer effects, and characterize the atoms in a prominent class of network models. We show that using knowledge of atoms to seed the diffusion of a behavior significantly increases diffusion compared to seeding based on standard community detection algorithms. We also show how to use observed behaviors to estimate the intensity of peer effects.

Keywords: Social Networks, Networks, Cohesion, Community Detection, Communities, Games on Networks, Coordination, Complementarities, Peer Effects, Peer Influence, Diffusion, Contagion, Atoms

JEL Classification: D85, D13, L14, O12, Z13