Using Aggregated Relational Data to Feasibly Identify Network Structure without Network Data
This work proposes an inexpensive and feasible strategy for network elicitation using Aggregated Relational Data (ARD): responses to questions of the form "how many of your links have trait k ?"
Abstract
<jats:p> Social network data are often prohibitively expensive to collect, limiting empirical network research. We propose an inexpensive and feasible strategy for network elicitation using Aggregated Relational Data (ARD): responses to questions of the form “how many of your links have trait k ?” Our method uses ARD to recover parameters of a network formation model, which permits sampling from a distribution over node- or graph-level statistics. We replicate the results of two field experiments that used network data and draw similar conclusions with ARD alone. (JEL C81, C93, D85, Z13) </jats:p>