مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد رفتار خاص شریک در شبکه های اجتماعی – الزویر 2018

People are often in situations in which they benefit from adjusting their behavior to the behavior of others in their social environment. Examples include driving on the same side of the road as other drivers, setting the time for a meeting, and talking in the same language as the person we are talking to (Bojanowski and Buskens, 2011; Harsanyi and Selten, 1988; Schelling, 1960). In these situations, individuals try to anticipate what others will do to determine their own behavior (Lewis, 1969). In other words, individuals aim at coordinating their decisions in order to achieve a commonly desired outcome (Blume, 1993). These coordination problems are often resolved by conventions guiding our behavior. The emergence of conventions is often related to the existence of social norms: a pattern of behavior that is customary, expected, and self-enforcing (Ullmann-Margalit, 1977; Young, 1998). In the Netherlands, we speak Dutch by convention. But what happens in groups in which the convention is not so obvious and differentindividuals prefer different conventions? This paper is concerned with situations in which coordination is not straightforward. It studies how actors handle coordination problems if the actors in a social network have different preferences. The following example will be used as the illustrative example: a group of employees has to work in pairs to create a product. The product depends on software components the employees develop in pairs. Within these pairs it is costly if the employees do not use the same operating system (say, Windows or Mac). We assume, for the sake of illustration, that the chosen operating system is not crucial for integrating the software components developed by different pairs to compose the final group product. All employees have to decide individually whether to use the Windows or Mac operating system. Assume that some employees prefer to use Windows, while others prefer Mac. Notwithstanding this heterogeneity in preferences between the employees, all pairs of employees are more productive when they create the program on the same operating system, due to the advantages of integrating their efforts (coordination), instead of each working on their own preferred operating system (miscoordination). However, an employee who decides to design the software component on the operating system preferred by the other employee, but not by himself has lower benefits from the coordination, since that employee has to investin working with the non-preferred operating system. In the example above, coordination is straightforward between two employees who prefer the same operating system. Coordination is more difficult between two employees who differ in their preferences as it introduces uncertainty as to which employee should deviate from his or her preference in order to coordinate. The situation becomes even more complicated when employees do not develop components with only one colleague at a time, but are involved in a network and are working with multiple colleagues simultaneously. In these situations the structure of the network matters (e.g. Choi and Lee, 2014; Goyal, 2007).