16 Feb
2009
16 Feb
'09
8:54 p.m.
Dear Applied Statistics Community,
Please join us this Wednesday when Filiz Garip, Harvard Department of
Sociology, will present here joint-work with Paul Dimaggio, "How Do Network
Externalities Lead to Intergroup Inequality?". Filiz provided the following
abstract for her talk:
In this paper, we identify a mechanism, which we contend chronically
reproduces and, under some conditions, may generate or even efface
intergroup inequality. That mechanism is (a) the diffusion of goods,
services, and practices that (b) are characterized by strong network
externalities under conditions of (c) social homophily. When the value of a
good or practice to an agent is a function of the number of persons in that
agent's network who also possess the good or engage in the practice, and
when networks are homophilic with respect to certain social characteristics,
this mechanism will exacerbate initial individual-level differences in
access to the good or practice and, under some conditions, induce persistent
intergroup inequality. We illustrate this claim in two empirical contexts.
For the first, the diffusion of access to and use of the Internet, we start
with observed data on the relationship between cost and adoption and between
adoption levels and price, and produce a computational model that permits us
to predict variation in intergroup inequality over time as a function of
variation in the strength of network externalities and the extent of social
homophily. For the second, the practice of rural-to-urban migration by young
people in rural Thailand, we use village-level data on family resources and
migration patterns to explore the relationship between information sharing,
homophily, and intergroup differences in migration.
The Applied Statistics Workshop meets each Wednesday at 12 noon in K-354
CGIS-Knafel (1737 Cambridge St). The workshop begins with a light lunch and
presentations usually start around 1215 and last until about 130 pm.
Hope you can make it
Cheers
Justin Grimmer