论文标题
不可观察的特征在友谊网络形成中的作用
The role of unobservable characteristics in friendship network formation
论文作者
论文摘要
近亲同质性是人类社会网络的一个普遍特征，具有重要的个人和团体级别的社会，经济和健康后果。文献提出了人际关系可能会分类的大量维度，而没有提出统一的经验框架框架来分类。我们利用具有非常相似特征的大学新生样本的丰富数据 - 年龄，种族和教育和对比 - 可观察到的与无法观察到的特征在其友谊形成中的相对重要性。我们采用平均贝叶斯模型，这是一种明确设计的方法，旨在针对模型不确定性，并在预测友谊的同时评估每个候选属性的鲁棒性。我们表明，尽管可观察到的特征，例如将学生分配到部分，性别和吸烟是强大的关键决定因素，即两个人是否相互交友，但不可观察的属性，例如人格，认知能力，经济偏好，经济偏好或社会经济方面，对模型的规格和友谊的预测者都不重要。
Inbreeding homophily is a prevalent feature of human social networks with important individual and group-level social, economic, and health consequences. The literature has proposed an overwhelming number of dimensions along which human relationships might sort, without proposing a unified empirically-grounded framework for their categorization. We exploit rich data on a sample of University freshmen with very similar characteristic - age, race and education- and contrast the relative importance of observable vs. unobservables characteristics in their friendship formation. We employ Bayesian Model Averaging, a methodology explicitly designed to target model uncertainty and to assess the robustness of each candidate attribute while predicting friendships. We show that, while observable features such as assignment of students to sections, gender, and smoking are robust key determinants of whether two individuals befriend each other, unobservable attributes, such as personality, cognitive abilities, economic preferences, or socio-economic aspects, are largely sensible to the model specification, and are not important predictors of friendships.
