Social Context and Network Formation: Experimental Studies

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in how strategic action influences network structure. Motivated by the widespread belief that ‘networks matter’ in the process of reaching personal objectives, it is a natural assumption that rational actors will try to strategically arrange their ties in order to optimize their expected utility. Starting from the notion that there exist rival theories on what the best strategy is to form linkages and that the applicability of these theories varies across social contexts, we will examine how (groups of) actors change their networks in order to reach better positions. Theoretical results predict that emerging networks are to a large extent contingent on the social context and the adjacent behavior actors follow to choose their relations in such a context. Experiments will be used to test this conjecture.