Open AccessPosted Content
The Diffusion of Microfinance
Abhijit Banerjee,Arun G. Chandrasekhar,Arun G. Chandrasekhar,Esther Duflo,Matthew O. Jackson,Matthew O. Jackson,Matthew O. Jackson +6 more
TLDR
This article examined how participation in a micro-finance program diffuses through social networks and found that participants are significantly more likely to pass information on to friends and acquaintances than informed non-participants.Abstract:
We examine how participation in a microfinance program diffuses through social networks. We collected detailed demographic and social network data in 43 villages in South India before microfinance was introduced in those villages and then tracked eventual participation. We exploit exogenous variation in the importance (in a network sense) of the people who were first informed about the program, "the injection points". Microfinance participation is higher when the injection points have higher eigenvector centrality. We estimate structural models of diffusion that allow us to (i) determine the relative roles of basic information transmission versus other forms of peer influence, and (ii) distinguish information passing by participants and non-participants. We find that participants are significantly more likely to pass information on to friends and acquaintances than informed non-participants, but that information passing by non-participants is still substantial and significant, accounting for roughly a third of informedness and participation. We also find that, conditioned on being informed, an individual's decision is not significantly affected by the participation of her acquaintances.read more
Citations
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Science Mapping of the Global Knowledge Base on Microfinance: Influential Authors and Documents, 1989–2019
TL;DR: The use of micro-finance in poverty alleviation and, by extension, as an instrument for sustainable social and economic development represents a novel idea in sustainable finance as mentioned in this paper, but the field attracted increased attention only after 2006, when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus.
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The evolution of cultural complexity: Not by the treadmill alone
Claes Andersson,Dwight W. Read +1 more
TL;DR: The treadmill model is reviewed, an assessment of its current status is made, and a more synthetic proposition is moved on to by placing the model into the context of other models addressing the elaboration of cultural complexity.
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Indirectly connected: simple social differences can explain the causes and apparent consequences of complex social network positions
TL;DR: The findings demonstrate that relationships between complex network positions and other behaviours or fitness components do not provide sufficient evidence for the presence, or importance, of complex social behaviours, even if direct network metrics provide less explanatory power than indirect ones.
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A novel game theoretic approach for modeling competitive information diffusion in social networks with heterogeneous nodes
Mehrdad Agha Mohammad Ali Kermani,Seyed Farshad Fatemi Ardestani,Alireza Aliahmadi,Farnaz Barzinpour +3 more
TL;DR: A game theoretic framework is developed that models a competitive influence maximization problem and demonstrates that graph topology, as well as the nodes’ sociability and initial tendency measures have an effect on the determination of the influential node in the network.
Posted Content
Strategic influence in social networks
Michel Grabisch,Michel Grabisch,Antoine Mandel,Antoine Mandel,Agnieszka Rusinowska,Agnieszka Rusinowska,Emily Tanimura +6 more
TL;DR: The characterization of equilibrium obtained emphasizes on the one hand the influenceability of target agents and on the other hand their centrality whose natural measure in this context defines a new concept, related to betweenness centrality, that is called intermediacy.
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