Behavioral Communities and the Atomic Structure of Networks

When people prefer to coordinate their behaviors with their friends – e.g., choosing whether to adopt a new technology, to protest against a government, to attend university – divisions within a social network can sustain different behaviors in different parts of the network. We define a society’s behavioral communities' via its network's atoms’: groups of people who adopt the same behavior in every equilibrium. We analyze how the atoms change with the intensity of the peer effects, and characterize the atoms in a prominent class of network models. We show that using knowledge of atoms to seed the diffusion of a behavior significantly increases diffusion compared to seeding based on standard community detection algorithms. We also show how to use observed behaviors to estimate the intensity of peer effects.