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Communication and Coordination in Social Networks
The Review of Economic Studies, 67 (1): 1-16 (2000)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-937X.00118
Аннотация
I model people in a coordination game who use a communication network to tell each other their willingness to participate. The minimal sufficient networks for coordination can be interpreted as placing people into a hierarchy of social roles or ?stages??: ?initial adopters??, then ?followers??, and so on down to ?late adopters??. A communication network helps coordination in exactly two ways: by informing each stage about earlier stages, and by creating common knowledge within each stage. We then consider two examples: first we show that ?low dimensional?? networks can be better for coordination even though they have far fewer links than ?high dimensional?? networks; second we show that wide dispersion of ?insurgents??, people predisposed toward participation, can be good for coordination but too much dispersion can be bad.
