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Title: Observed choices and underlying opportunities

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2010

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Abstract: Our societies are heterogeneous in many dimensions such as cen-sus, education, religion, ethnic and cultural composition. The linksbetween individuals e.g. by friendship, marriage or collaboration are not evenly distributed, but rather tend to be concentrated withinthe same group. This phenomenon, called imbreeding homophily, hasbeen related to either (social) preference for links with owntype in-dividuals (choicebased homophily) or to the prevalence of individualsof her same type in the choice set of an individual (opportunitybasedhomophily). Choices determine the network of relations we observewhereas opportunities pertain to the composition of the (unobserv-able) social network individuals are embedded in and out of whichtheir network of relations is drawn. In this view, we propose a methodthat, in the presence of multiple data, allows one to distinguish be-tween opportunity and choice based homophily. The main intuitionis that, with unbiased opportunities, the effect of choicebased ho-mophily gets weaker and weaker as the size of the minority shrinks,because individuals of the minority rarely meet and have the chanceto establish links together. The occurrence of homophily in the limitof very small minorities is therefore an indicator of opportunity bias.We test this idea across the dimensions of race and education on dataon US marriages, and across race on friendships in US schools.

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Authors: Pin, Paolo; Marsili, Matteo; Franz, Silvio

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Education, Family and Marriage, Race and Ethnicity

Countries: United States