Lecture by Prof. Miguel A. Meléndez-Jiméne, Universidad de Málaga, at the BERG Research Seminar on the 8th of December

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Miguel A. Meléndez-Jiméne, Universidad de Málaga, will give a lecture within the BERG-Research Seminar on the topic of

“Tolerance and polarization: The role of popularity networks”

The date is Monday, 8th of December, 2 p.m., in room FG1/00.08.

Individuals (political parties) often differ in their identities (ideologies), i.e., the behaviors they consider ideal. Nevertheless, in order to be accepted by others they must compromise, i.e, choose costly actions to get closer to others’ ideal values. Based on the paper by Genicot (2022) on tolerance and compromise we construct a two-stage model in which agents first choose actions and secondly, a pairwise stable network forms. The novelty of our approach is that tolerance levels depend endogenously on the degree of agents in the network. In particular, the more popular an individual is the more she/he is tolerated by others. Assuming uniformly distributed identities and optimistic individuals (i.e., no coordination failure in the link formation stage), we characterize a family of two distinct network structures in equilibrium: lattices and bridges. Following the polarization measure introduced by Esteban et al. (2007) we show that, in equilibrium, there is co-existence of cohesive and polarized societies depending on the identity and number of leaders (versus followers). Thus, ex ante identical societies could exhibit substantially different polarization levels due to the endogeneity of popularity.