IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tul/wpaper/2412.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Do "Birds of a Feather Flock Together?" Gender Differences in Decision-making Homophily of Friendships

Author

Listed:
  • James Alm

    (Tulane University)

  • Weizheng Lai

    (University of Maryland, College Park)

  • Xun Li

    (Wuhan University)

  • Peiwen Yuan

    (Peking University)

Abstract

“Homophily” – the tendency of individuals to associate with others who are similar – is considered as a key determinant of friendships. Most studies focus on the homophily of friendships as measured by demographic characteristics. In this paper, we explore patterns of homophily as measured by risk preferences and social preferences, both of which are elicited from a large-scale laboratory experiment. Our focus is on gender differences in homophily, which are examined by testing for behavioral gaps in friendship formation within a pair of same-gender friends in a series of decision-making tasks. We find significant gender differences in homophily: among males, friendship appears along with similar patterns in social decision-making, while females are more likely to become friends with those who exhibit different patterns of decision-making. Our findings are consistent across various robustness checks. We conclude by proposing potential explanations for these gender differences.

Suggested Citation

  • James Alm & Weizheng Lai & Xun Li & Peiwen Yuan, 2024. "Do "Birds of a Feather Flock Together?" Gender Differences in Decision-making Homophily of Friendships," Working Papers 2412, Tulane University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:tul:wpaper:2412
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://repec.tulane.edu/RePEc/pdf/tul2412.pdf
    File Function: First Version, December 2024
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Homophily; Friendship Formation; Risk Preferences; Social Preferences; Gender Differences;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D85 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Network Formation
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tul:wpaper:2412. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kerui Geng (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/detulus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.