Eliciting real-life social networks: a guided tour

Limited attention has been devoted on how real-life social networks are elicited and mapped, even less from the viewpoint of mechanism design. This paper surveys the few mechanisms that have been proposed by the experimental literature to this purpose. These mechanisms differ in their incentive structure, as well as the means of reward they employ. We compare these elicitation devices on the basis of the estimated differences in the characteristics of the induced networks, such as the number of (mutual) links, correspondence and accuracy. Our main conclusion is that the elicited network architecture is itself dependent on the nature (and the structure) of the incentives. This, in turn, provides the social scientist with guidelines on the most appropriate device to be used, depending on the research objectives.