Arnout van de Rijt

Dynamics of Networks If Everyone Strives for Structural Holes

When entrepreneurs enter structural holes in networks, they can exploit the related benefits. Evidence for these benefits has steadily accumulated. The authors ask whether those who strive for such structural advantages can maintain them if others follow their example. Burt speculates that they cannot, but a formal demonstration of this speculation is lacking. Using a game theoretic model of network formation, the authors characterize the networks that emerge when everyone strives for structural holes. They find that the predominant stable networks distribute benefits evenly, confirming that no one is able to maintain a structural advantage in the long run.

Field experiments of success-breeds-success dynamics

Significance Social scientists have long debated why similar individuals often experience drastically different degrees of success. Some scholars have suggested such inequality merely reflects hard-to-observe personal differences in ability. Others have proposed that one fortunate success may trigger another, thus producing arbitrary differentiation. We conducted randomized experiments through intervention in live social systems to test for success-breeds-success dynamics. Results show that different kinds of success (money, quality ratings, awards, and endorsements) when bestowed upon arbitrarily selected recipients all produced significant improvements in subsequent rates of success as compared with the control group of nonrecipients. However, greater amounts of initial success failed to produce much greater subsequent success, suggesting limits to the distortionary effects of social feedback. Seemingly similar individuals often experience drastically different success trajectories, with some repeatedly failing and others consistently succeeding. One explanation is preexisting variability along unobserved fitness dimensions that is revealed gradually through differential achievement. Alternatively, positive feedback operating on arbitrary initial advantages may increasingly set apart winners from losers, producing runaway inequality. To identify social feedback in human reward systems, we conducted randomized experiments by intervening in live social environments across the domains of funding, status, endorsement, and reputation. In each system we consistently found that early success bestowed upon arbitrarily selected recipients produced significant improvements in subsequent rates of success compared with the control group of nonrecipients. However, success exhibited decreasing marginal returns, with larger initial advantages failing to produce much further differentiation. These findings suggest a lesser degree of vulnerability of reward systems to incidental or fabricated advantages and a more modest role for cumulative advantage in the explanation of social inequality than previously thought.

Only 15 Minutes? The Social Stratification of Fame in Printed Media

Contemporary scholarship has conceptualized modern fame as an open system in which people continually move in and out of celebrity status. This model stands in stark contrast to the traditional notion in the sociology of stratification that depicts stable hierarchies sustained through classic forces such as social structure and cumulative advantage. We investigate the mobility of fame using a unique data source containing daily records of references to person names in a large corpus of English-language media sources. These data reveal that only at the bottom of the public attention hierarchy do names exhibit fast turnover; at upper tiers, stable coverage persists around a fixed level and rank for decades. Fame exhibits strong continuity even in entertainment, on television, and on blogs, where it has been thought to be most ephemeral. We conclude that once a person’s name is decoupled from the initial event that lent it momentary attention, self-reinforcing processes, career structures, and commemorative practices perpetuate fame.

Experimental Study of Informal Rewards in Peer Production

We test the effects of informal rewards in online peer production. Using a randomized, experimental design, we assigned editing awards or “barnstars” to a subset of the 1% most productive Wikipedia contributors. Comparison with the control group shows that receiving a barnstar increases productivity by 60% and makes contributors six times more likely to receive additional barnstars from other community members, revealing that informal rewards significantly impact individual effort.

Neighborhood Chance and Neighborhood Change: A Comment on Bruch and Mare1

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The Micro-Macro Link for the Theory of Structural Balance

I consider the principle of structural balance that is commonly characterized with the aphorisms: “The friend of a friend is a friend, the friend of an enemy is an enemy, the enemy of a friend is an enemy, and the enemy of an enemy is a friend.” I study what patterns of friendship and hostility emerge at the macro-level when actors at the micro-level make friends and enemies in accordance with this principle. Recent studies have drawn attention to configurations that are imbalanced with many triadic relations violating structural balance yet jammed because no change in sentiment in any one relation can accomplish a net reduction in the number of violations of structural balance. The existence of such jammed states suggests that individual behavior consistent with structural balance need not aggregate to system-wide satisfaction of the principle. To investigate this I employ a best-response model of sentiment change on a fixed social network. I show that under a broad set of model conditions only configurations in which all triadic relations satisfy the structural balance principle can emerge. In a close-knit community in which all actors maintain relations with all other actors such a balanced configuration must consist of either one friendship clique or multiple antagonistic groups.I consider the principle of structural balance that is commonly characterized with the aphorisms: “The friend of a friend is a friend, the friend of an enemy is an enemy, the enemy of a friend is an enemy, and the enemy of an enemy is a friend.” I study what patterns of friendship and hostility emerge at the macro-level when actors at the micro-level make friends and enemies in accordance with this principle. Recent studies have drawn attention to configurations that are imbalanced with many triadic relations violating structural balance yet jammed because no change in sentiment in any one relation can accomplish a net reduction in the number of violations of structural balance. The existence of such jammed states suggests that individual behavior consistent with structural balance need not aggregate to system-wide satisfaction of the principle. To investigate this I employ a best-response model of sentiment change on a fixed social network. I show that under a broad set of model conditions only configura...

A Paper Ceiling Explaining the Persistent Underrepresentation of Women in Printed News

In the early twenty-first century, women continue to receive substantially less media coverage than men, despite women’s much increased participation in public life. Media scholars argue that actors in news organizations skew news coverage in favor of men and male-related topics. However, no previous study has systematically examined whether such media bias exists beyond gender ratio imbalances in coverage that merely mirror societal-level structural and occupational gender inequalities. Using novel longitudinal data, we empirically isolate media-level factors and examine their effects on women’s coverage rates in hundreds of newspapers. We find that societal-level inequalities are the dominant determinants of continued gender differences in coverage. The media focuses nearly exclusively on the highest strata of occupational and social hierarchies, in which women’s representation has remained poor. We also find that women receive greater exposure in newspaper sections led by female editors, as well as in newspapers whose editorial boards have higher female representation. However, these differences appear to be mostly correlational, as women’s coverage rates do not noticeably improve when male editors are replaced by female editors in a given newspaper.

Ethnic Preferences and Residential Segregation: Theoretical Explorations Beyond Detroit

We are strongly supportive of Fossetts theoretical approach and modeling methodology, which uses computational methods to perform thought experiments that generate compelling insights into the enigma of persistent residential segregation in the U.S. We also agree with his theoretical results, which challenge the prevailing view among demographers that institutional discrimination is the essential cause. However, we think he did not go far enough. Fossett limited his analysis to a narrow region of the parameter space that corresponded to conditions observed in one city at one time. This precludes generalization to other times and places and exploration of theoretically motivated “what if” scenarios that trespass beyond the Detroit city limits. When we extended the parameter space, we noticed two interesting results. First, Fossetts “paradox of weak minority preferences” requires qualification. Disproportionate in-group preferences among minorities are indeed segregation-promoting, not integration-promoting, but they generally have less impact on segregation than the in-group preferences of the majority. Second, not only are exclusionary practices and institutional discrimination not necessary for segregation (as Fossett demonstrates), we show that in certain regions of the parameter space they are not even sufficient.

No praise without effort: experimental evidence on how rewards affect Wikipedia's contributor community

The successful provision of public goods through mass volunteering over the Internet poses a puzzle to classic social science theories of human cooperation. A solution suggested by recent studies proposes that informal rewards (e.g. a thumbs-up, a badge, an editing award, etc.) can motivate participants by raising their status in the community, which acts as a select incentive to continue contributing. Indeed, a recent study of Wikipedia found that receiving a reward had a large positive effect on the subsequent contribution levels of highly-active contributors. While these findings are suggestive, they only pertained to already highly-active contributors. Can informal rewards also serve as a mechanism to increase participation among less-active contributors by initiating a virtuous cycle of work and reward? We conduct a field experiment on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia in which we bestowed rewards to randomly selected editors of varying productivity levels. Analysis of post-treatment activity shows that despite greater room for less-active contributors to increase their productive efforts, rewards yielded increases in work only among already highly-productive editors. On the other hand, rewards were associated with lower retention of less-active contributors. These findings suggest that the incentive structure in peer production is broadly meritocratic, as highly-active contributors accumulate the most rewards. However, this may also contribute to the divide between the stable core of highly-prodigious producers and a peripheral population of less-active contributors with shorter volunteer tenures.

Sequential Power-Dependence Theory

Existing methods for predicting resource divisions in laboratory exchange networks do not take into account the sequential nature of the experimental setting. We extend network exchange theory by considering sequential exchange. We prove that Sequential Power-Dependence Theory—unlike Power-Dependence Theory and most other exchange theories—has a unique point prediction for resource divisions in every network, and we show that these point predictions fare well in comparison to those from established theories.