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 possible repetitions in the information they receive. The results indicate that network structure plays a signicant role in determining social inuence. However, the most inuential agents are not those with more outgoing links, as predicted by the persuasion bias hypothesis, but those with more incoming links. We show that a boundedly rational updating rule that takes into account not only agents' outdegree, but also their indegree, provides a better explanation of the experimental data. In this framework, consensus beliefs tend to be swayed towards the opinions of inuential listeners. We then present an eort-weighted updating model as a more general characterization of information aggregation in social networks.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.