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Marion Hoffman from Toulouse School of Economics and Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse is holding a seminar on Thursday, April 16Title: Micro-foundations of group formation: When do statistical models reflect social mechanisms?
(Work is jointly made by Marion Hoffman, with Péter Bayer, Marijn Keijzer, and Viviana Amati)
Abstract:
Statistical models for social networks have long relied on counting local patterns to characterize global structure, an approach that is now being extended to higher-order settings such as bipartite networks and hypergraphs. As these models move beyond dyadic relations, a key question becomes how the statistical representations they provide relate to the micro-level mechanisms of group formation. Analytical sociology has long emphasized that simple individual rules can generate complex and sometimes counterintuitive macro-level outcomes. Building on this perspective, we propose a game-theoretic framework for group formation that allows us to interpret exponential-family models for higher-order relations in terms of the individual incentives they implicitly encode. We apply this framework to a recently developed statistical model for partitions, a special case of hypergraphs. Our results highlight two contrasting cases. In some formulations, classic individual incentives at the micro level aggregate in a way that aligns with standard statistical representations used in these models. In others, however, this alignment breaks down: simple micro-level mechanisms cannot be represented using intuitive statistics, and statistics that appear to capture these mechanisms may in fact be generated by fundamentally different processes. These results provide a way to think systematically about group formation processes and highlight the need for caution when interpreting statistical models of higher-order structure as representations of underlying micro-level mechanisms.
Onsite venue: KO301, Kopparhammaren 2, Campus Norrköping
Also available online on Zoom (contact [email protected] for Zoom link).
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Event Venue
Kopparhammaren 7, Kungsgatan 56, 60233 Norrköping, Sweden, Kungsgatan 56, SE-602 33 Norrköping, Sverige, Norrköping, Sweden
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