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 char...