Who are the key players? Listeners vs spreaders vs others

Abstract

The literature on social learning examines how people learn from their neighbors and reach a consensus. The DeGroot social learning model describes the social learning process as one in which people form their opinions by taking a weighted average of their neighbors’ opinions. In the model, the influence structure is represented by a single matrix. In this paper, we empirically identify the role of the hub and authority centralities based on this matrix using data on microfinance adoption in rural Indian villages. Controlling for other well-known centrality measures, authority centrality is positively associated with final adoption rates in the villages, but hub centrality is not. Furthermore, we find that authority centrality is the most informative variable predicting microfinance diffusion success from LASSO regressions.