American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Using Aggregated Relational Data to Feasibly Identify Network Structure without Network Data
American Economic Review
vol. 110,
no. 8, August 2020
(pp. 2454–84)
Abstract
Social network data are often prohibitively expensive to collect, limiting empirical network research. We propose an inexpensive and feasible strategy for network elicitation using Aggregated Relational Data (ARD): responses to questions of the form "how many of your links have trait k?" Our method uses ARD to recover parameters of a network formation model, which permits sampling from a distribution over node- or graph-level statistics. We replicate the results of two field experiments that used network data and draw similar conclusions with ARD alone.Citation
Breza, Emily, Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Tyler H. McCormick, and Mengjie Pan. 2020. "Using Aggregated Relational Data to Feasibly Identify Network Structure without Network Data." American Economic Review 110 (8): 2454–84. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20170861Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- C81 Methodology for Collecting, Estimating, and Organizing Microeconomic Data; Data Access
- C93 Field Experiments
- D85 Network Formation and Analysis: Theory
- Z13 Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification