IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/beb/wpbels/201403.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

An Experimental Study of Persuasion Bias and Social Influence in Networks

Author

Listed:
  • Jordi Brandts

    (Institutd'AnalisiEconomica(CSIC)
    Barcelona GSE)

  • Ayça Ebru Giritligil

    (Murat Sertel Center for Advanced Economic Studies
    İstanbul Bilgi University)

  • Roberto A. Weber

    (Department of Economics, University of Zurich)

Abstract

In many areas of social life individuals receive information about a particular issue of interest from multiple sources. When these sources are connected through a network then proper aggregation of this information by an individual involves taking into account the structure of this network. The inability to aggregate properly may lead to various types of distortions. In our experiment a number of agents all want to find out the value of a particular parameter unknown to all. Agents receive private signals about the parameter and agents can communicate their estimates of the parameter repeatedly through a network, the structure of which is known by all players. We present results from experiments with four different networks. We find that the information of agents who have more outgoing links in a network gets more weight in the information aggregation of the other agents than it optimally should. Our results are consistent with the model of “persuasion bias” of De Marzo et al. (2003) and at odds with an alternative heuristic according to which the most influential agents are those with more incoming links.

Suggested Citation

  • Jordi Brandts & Ayça Ebru Giritligil & Roberto A. Weber, 2014. "An Experimental Study of Persuasion Bias and Social Influence in Networks," BELIS Working Papers 2014-03, BELIS, Istanbul Bilgi University.
    • Handle: RePEc:beb:wpbels:201403
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://repeck.bilgi.org.tr/RePEc/beb/wpbels/BelisWP_BELIS03.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2014
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Armin Falk & James J. Heckman, 2009. "Lab Experiments are a Major Source of Knowledge in the Social Sciences," Working Papers 200935, Geary Institute, University College Dublin.
    2. Gale, Douglas & Kariv, Shachar, 2003. "Bayesian learning in social networks," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 45(2), pages 329-346, November.
    3. Ben Greiner, 2015. "Subject pool recruitment procedures: organizing experiments with ORSEE," Journal of the Economic Science Association, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 1(1), pages 114-125, July.
    4. Corazzini, Luca & Pavesi, Filippo & Petrovich, Beatrice & Stanca, Luca, 2012. "Influential listeners: An experiment on persuasion bias in social networks," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 56(6), pages 1276-1288.
    5. Szeidl, Adam & Mobius, Markus & Phan, Tuan, 2015. "Treasure Hunt: Social Learning in the Field," CEPR Discussion Papers 10493, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    6. Banerjee, Abhijit & Jackson, Matthew O. & Duflo, Esther & Chandrasekhar, Arun G., 2012. "The Diffusion of Microfinance," CEPR Discussion Papers 8770, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    7. Benjamin Enke & Florian Zimmermann, 2019. "Correlation Neglect in Belief Formation," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 86(1), pages 313-332.
    8. Daron Acemoglu & Munther A. Dahleh & Ilan Lobel & Asuman Ozdaglar, 2011. "Bayesian Learning in Social Networks," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 78(4), pages 1201-1236.
    9. Peter M. DeMarzo & Dimitri Vayanos & Jeffrey Zwiebel, 2003. "Persuasion Bias, Social Influence, and Unidimensional Opinions," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 118(3), pages 909-968.
    10. Battiston, Pietro & Stanca, Luca, 2015. "Boundedly rational opinion dynamics in social networks: Does indegree matter?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 119(C), pages 400-421.
    11. Urs Fischbacher, 2007. "z-Tree: Zurich toolbox for ready-made economic experiments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 10(2), pages 171-178, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hidalgo-Hidalgo, Marisa & Jiménez, Natalia & López-Pintado, Dunia, 2021. "Social influence and position effects," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 182(C), pages 113-131.
    2. Battiston, Pietro & Stanca, Luca, 2015. "Boundedly rational opinion dynamics in social networks: Does indegree matter?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 119(C), pages 400-421.
    3. Szeidl, Adam & Mobius, Markus & Phan, Tuan, 2015. "Treasure Hunt: Social Learning in the Field," CEPR Discussion Papers 10493, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    4. João V. Ferreira & Erik Schokkaert & Benoît Tarroux, 2023. "How group deliberation affects individual distributional preferences: An experimental study," Working Papers 2301, Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon St-Étienne (GATE Lyon St-Étienne), Université de Lyon.
    5. Isabel Melguizo, 2019. "Homophily and the Persistence of Disagreement," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 129(619), pages 1400-1424.
    6. Mohsen Foroughifar, 2021. "Errors in Learning from Others' Choices," Papers 2105.01043, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2021.
    7. Naegels, Vanessa & D’Espallier, Bert & Mori, Neema, 2020. "Perceived problems with collateral: The value of informal networking," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 65(C), pages 32-45.
    8. Jakob Grazzini & Domenico Massaro, 2016. "Dispersed Information and the Origins of Aggregate Fluctuations," CESifo Working Paper Series 5957, CESifo.
    9. Berno Buechel & Stefan Klößner & Martin Lochmüller & Heiko Rauhut, 2020. "The strength of weak leaders: an experiment on social influence and social learning in teams," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 23(2), pages 259-293, June.
    10. Foerster, Manuel, 2018. "Finite languages, persuasion bias, and opinion fluctuations," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 149(C), pages 46-57.
    11. Friederike Mengel, 2021. "Gender Bias In Opinion Aggregation," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 62(3), pages 1055-1080, August.
    12. Rapanos, Theodoros, 2023. "What makes an opinion leader: Expertise vs popularity," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 138(C), pages 355-372.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Battiston, Pietro & Stanca, Luca, 2015. "Boundedly rational opinion dynamics in social networks: Does indegree matter?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 119(C), pages 400-421.
    2. Foerster, Manuel, 2018. "Finite languages, persuasion bias, and opinion fluctuations," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 149(C), pages 46-57.
    3. Buechel, Berno & Hellmann, Tim & Klößner, Stefan, 2015. "Opinion dynamics and wisdom under conformity," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 240-257.
    4. Berno Buechel & Stefan Klößner & Martin Lochmüller & Heiko Rauhut, 2020. "The strength of weak leaders: an experiment on social influence and social learning in teams," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 23(2), pages 259-293, June.
    5. Rusinowska, Agnieszka & Taalaibekova, Akylai, 2019. "Opinion formation and targeting when persuaders have extreme and centrist opinions," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 9-27.
    6. Corazzini, Luca & Pavesi, Filippo & Petrovich, Beatrice & Stanca, Luca, 2012. "Influential listeners: An experiment on persuasion bias in social networks," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 56(6), pages 1276-1288.
    7. Foerster, Manuel, 2019. "Dynamics of strategic information transmission in social networks," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 14(1), January.
    8. Dasaratha, Krishna & He, Kevin, 2020. "Network structure and naive sequential learning," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 15(2), May.
    9. Syngjoo Choi & Sanjeev Goyal & Frederic Moisan & Yu Yang Tony To, 2023. "Learning in Networks: An Experiment on Large Networks with Real-World Features," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 69(5), pages 2778-2787, May.
    10. Cox, Caleb & Davis, Douglas & Korenok, Oleg & Lightle, John, 2023. "Stress tests and information disclosure: An experimental analysis," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 154(C).
    11. Antinyan, Armenak & Horváth, Gergely & Jia, Mofei, 2020. "Positional concerns and social network structure: An experiment," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 129(C).
    12. Battiston, Pietro & Harrison, Sharon G., 2024. "Believe it or not: Experimental evidence on sunspot equilibria with social networks," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 143(C), pages 223-247.
    13. Hai-Bo Hu & Cang-Hai Li & Qing-Ying Miao, 2017. "Opinion Diffusion On Multilayer Social Networks," Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 20(06n07), pages 1-25, September.
    14. Zakharov, Alexei & Bondarenko, Oxana, 2021. "Social status and social learning," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 90(C).
    15. Li, Wei & Tan, Xu, 2021. "Cognitively-constrained learning from neighbors," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 129(C), pages 32-54.
    16. Sebastiano Della Lena, 2019. "Non-Bayesian Social Learning and the Spread of Misinformation in Networks," Working Papers 2019:09, Department of Economics, University of Venice "Ca' Foscari".
    17. Syngjoo Choi & Edoardo Gallo & Shachar Kariv, 2015. "Networks in the laboratory," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1551, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    18. Mueller-Frank, Manuel & Arieliy, Itai, 2015. "A General Model of Boundedly Rational Observational Learning: Theory and Experiment," IESE Research Papers D/1120, IESE Business School.
    19. Benjamin Enke & Florian Zimmermann, 2019. "Correlation Neglect in Belief Formation," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 86(1), pages 313-332.
    20. Feri, Francesco & Meléndez-Jiménez, Miguel A. & Ponti, Giovanni & Vega-Redondo, Fernando, 2011. "Error cascades in observational learning: An experiment on the Chinos game," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 73(1), pages 136-146, September.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C92 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Group Behavior
    • D03 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Behavioral Microeconomics: Underlying Principles
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:beb:wpbels:201403. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Fatih Mehmet Senyurt (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bebiltr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.