Dispersed Behavior and Perceptions in Assortative Societies

We formulate a model of social interactions and misinferences by agents who neglect assortativity in their society, mistakenly believing that they interact with a representative sample of the population. A key component of our approach is the interplay between this bias and agents' strategic incentives. We highlight a mechanism through which assortativity neglect, combined with strategic complementarities in agents' behavior, drives up action dispersion in society (e.g., socioeconomic disparities in education investment). We also suggest that the combination of assortativity neglect and strategic incentives may be relevant in understanding empirically documented misperceptions of income inequality and political attitude polarization.

Files

Metadata

Work Title Dispersed Behavior and Perceptions in Assortative Societies
Access
Open Access
Creators
  1. Mira Frick
  2. Ryota Iijima
  3. Yuhta Ishii
License In Copyright (Rights Reserved)
Work Type Article
Publisher
  1. American Economic Review
Publication Date September 1, 2022
Publisher Identifier (DOI)
  1. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20190486
Deposited January 25, 2024

Versions

Analytics

Collections

This resource is currently not in any collection.

Work History

Version 1
published

  • Created
  • Added finalANE0601-1.pdf
  • Added Creator Mira Frick
  • Added Creator Ryota Iijima
  • Added Creator Yuhta Ishii
  • Published
  • Updated