A statistical mechanics approach to Granovetter theory

Abstract

In this paper we try to bridge breakthroughs in quantitative sociology/econometrics pioneered during the last decades by Mac Fadden, Brock-Durlauf, Granovetter and Watts-Strogats through introducing a minimal model able to reproduce essentially all the features of social behavior highlighted by these authors. Our model relies on a pairwise Hamiltonian for decision maker interactions which naturally extends the multi-populations approaches by shifting and biasing the pattern definitions of an Hopfield model of neural networks. Once introduced, the model is investigated trough graph theory (to recover Granovetter and Watts-Strogats results) and statistical mechanics (to recover Mac-Fadden and Brock-Durlauf results). Due to internal symmetries of our model, the latter is obtained as the relaxation of a proper Markov process, allowing even to study its out of equilibrium properties. The method used to solve its equilibrium is an adaptation of the Hamilton-Jacobi technique recently introduced by Guerra in the spin glass scenario and the picture obtained is the following: just by assuming that the larger the amount of similarities among decision makers, the stronger their relative influence, this is enough to explain both the different role of strong and weak ties in the social network as well as its small world properties. As a result, imitative interaction strengths seem essentially a robust request (enough to break the gauge symmetry in the couplings), furthermore, this naturally leads to a discrete choice modelization when dealing with the external influences and to imitative behavior a la Curie-Weiss as the one introduced by Brock and Durlauf.