Networks and Decision-Making

This course is devoted to examining and understanding the limits of what we know about how networks shape decision-making.  There is no field of networks and decision-making as such.  But many network studies implicitly or explicitly examine how or why people make network-related decisions.  And for many questions in inequality, management, health, labor, gender, and countless other topics, either a network perspective that takes decisions into account or a decision-making perspective that considers people’s embeddedness in networks would prove valuable.  We will examine research in not only sociology and organizations but also economics, psychology, and anthropology.  We will study experimental, survey-based, interview-based, and ethnographic work.   We will examine the theoretical, epistemological, and methodological assumptions behind the readings, and explore where the figurative envelope can be pushed conceptually or empirically.  Though we will cover some technical issues, this is not a course on either network methods or choice modeling.  Our focus is ideas.

The course assumes basic training in social science methods at the graduate level in sociology, economics, psychology, or a related discipline, and some familiarity with network analysis.  It does not require formal training in network methods.  The course is ultimately experimental in nature.  You will be encouraged to think creatively, to experiment with ideas and methods, and to push your work beyond the comfort zones of traditional disciplinary thinking. Upon completion of the course, you will be able to assess cutting edge research on networks and decision-making critically, and produce a research paper on the topic addressing questions not yet answered in the literature.