Influential listeners: An experiment on persuasion bias in social networks

This paper presents an experimental investigation of persuasion bias, a form of bounded rationality whereby agents communicating through a social network are unable to account for repetitions in the information they receive. We find that, after repeated communication within a social network, social influence depends not only on being listened to by many others, but also on listening to many others. We show that persuasion bias can be viewed as an extreme case of a generalized boundedly rational updating rule in which agents receive more or less attention depending on how many other agents they listen to. The results indicate that behavior in the experiment is consistent with an updating rule according to which agents' social influence is proportional to their indegree.

► We study experimentally persuasion bias in social networks. ► We find that the most influential agents are those who listen to many others. ► We provide a generalized boundedly rational updating rule. ► Persuasion bias can be viewed as an extreme case of this rule. ► The results support social influence weights proportional to agents indegree.