What do nodes know? The importance of understanding actors’ information for network analysis

Network analysis is an increasingly popular tool among social scientists. Unfortunately, many claims about the relationship between network structure and social outcomes fail to account for the limited information about network structure available to individual nodes. We present an analytical argument that this failure to account for the intervening role of information in strategic interaction calls into question many prominent claims of social network analysts. We present experimental evidence that strategic actors are unable to condition their behavior on network structure without extensive information about that network. Our experimental results suggest that observational research should consider both the information environment in which actors make choices and the possible interaction between this environment and the structure of the underlying network.