American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
The Law of the Few
American Economic Review
vol. 100,
no. 4, September 2010
(pp. 1468–92)
Abstract
Empirical work shows that a large majority of individuals get most of their information from a very small subset of the group, viz., the influencers; moreover, there exist only minor differences between the observable characteristics of the influencers and the others. We refer to these empirical findings as the Law of the Few. This paper develops a model where players personally acquire information and form connections with others to access their information. Every (robust) equilibrium of this model exhibits the law of the few. (JEL D83, D85, Z13)Citation
Galeotti, Andrea, and Sanjeev Goyal. 2010. "The Law of the Few." American Economic Review, 100 (4): 1468–92. DOI: 10.1257/aer.100.4.1468Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D83 Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief
- D85 Network Formation and Analysis: Theory
- Z13 Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Social and Economic Stratification