Communication Networks and Social Dilemmas

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When individuals in a group have incentives to hoard information, the group may be less effective in achieving its goals. Mixed motives both to communicate and accumulate information create a "social dilemma" in which group and individual goals are in conflict. This project consists of a series of laboratory experiments designed to examine the ways in which communication patterns in networks are distorted by incentives to save information. The experiments will test the hypothesis that the vulnerability of communication networks to this type of conflict is a function of the distribution of information. Networks should be more vulnerable when they have potentially competing centers and less vulnerable when there is either one clearly central position or the network is widely decentralized. The contribution of the work will be to unite social psychological approaches to social dilemmas with sociological work on social networks.