Dr. Alison Watts
Professor
Department of Economics
Southern Illinois University
wattsa@siu.edu

Lecture Title : The Influence of Social Networks and Homophily on Correct Voting

There is empirical evidence suggesting that a person’s family, friends, or social ties influence who a person votes for.  Sokhey and McClurg (2012) find that as political disagreement in a person’s social network increases, then a person is less likely to vote correctly.  We develop a model where voters have different favorite policies and wish to vote correctly for the candidate who’s favorite policy is closest to their own.  Voters have beliefs about each candidate’s favorite policy which may or may not be correct.  Voters update their beliefs about political candidates based on who their conservative and liberal social ties are supporting.  We find that if everyone’s social network consists only of those most like themselves, then the conditions needed for correct voting to be stable are fairly weak; thus political agreement in one’s social network facilitates correct voting.  We also give conditions under which correct voting is stable for networks exhibiting homophily and for networks exhibiting random social interactions.

Speaker Bio:

Alison Watts is a professor of economics at Southern Illinois University. Her research focuses on game theory as applied to social and economic networks, cost sharing, and law and economics. Her recent work focuses on the formation of social and economic networks as well as applications of network theory to fund-raising games and to political outcomes, and applications of game theory to radio spectrum access. Her work has been published in the Journal of Economic Theory, Games and Economic Behavior, and the International Journal of Game Theory. Alison Watts received a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University in mathematics and a Ph.D. in economics from Duke University.

Selected Publications:

• “Career and Family Choices in the Presence of Uncertainty,” Review of Business and Economics, forthcoming.
• “Social Games: Matching and the Play of Finitely Repeated Games,” (with M. Jackson),Games and Economic Behavior, 70 (1), 2010, 170-191.
• “Formation of Segregated and Integrated Groups,” International Journal of Game Theory, 35, 2007, 505-519.
• “Formation of Buyer-Seller Trade Networks in a Quality-Differentiated Product Market,” (with P. Wang), Canadian Journal of Economics, 39, 2006, 971-1004.
• “The Evolution of Social and Economic Networks” (with M. Jackson), Journal of Economic Theory, 106, 2002, 265-295.
• “On the Formation of Interaction Networks in Social Coordination Games,” (with M. Jackson), Games and Economic Behavior, 41, 2002, 265–291.