In particular, in 521 villages in Haryana, we provided information on monthly immunization camps to either randomly selected individuals (in some villages) or to individuals nominated by villagers as people who would be good at transmitting information (in other villages). We find that the number of children vaccinated every month is 22% higher in villages in which nominees received the information.
From Banerjee et al. 2019
The buildings, which are social units, were randomized to (1) targeting 20% of the women at random, (2) targeting friends of such randomly chosen women, (3) targeting pairs of people composed of randomly chosen women and a friend, or (4) no targeting. Both targeting algorithms, friendship nomination and pair targeting, enhanced adoption of a public health intervention related to the use of iron-fortified salt for anemia.
Coupon redemption reports showed that unadjusted adoption rates were 13.6% (SE = 1.5%) in the friend-targeted clusters, 11.2% (SE = 1.4%) in pair-targeted clusters, 9.1% (SE = 1.3%) in the randomly targeted clusters, and 0% in the control clusters receiving no intervention.
From Alexander et al. 2022
Here’s a Twitter thread on the topic by Nicholas Christakis.
Targeting “structurally influential individuals,” e.g., people with lots of friends, people who are well regarded, etc., can lead to larger returns per ‘contact.’ This can be a useful thing. And as the studies demonstrate, finding these influential people is not hard—just ask a few people. There are, however, a few concerns:
- One of the concerns with any targeting strategy is that it can change who is treated. When you use network-based targeting, it biases the treated sample toward those who are more connected. That could be a good thing, especially if returns are the highest on those with the most friends, like in the case of curbing contagious diseases, or it could be a bad thing if the returns are the greatest on the least connected people. The more general point here is that most ROI calculations for network targeting have only accounted for costs of contact and assumed the benefits to be either constant or increasing in network size. One can easily rectify this by specifying the ROI function more fully or adding “fairness” or some kind of balance as a constraint.
- There is some stochasticity that stems from which person is targeted, and their idiosyncratic impact needs to be baked into standard error calculations for the ‘treatment,’ which is the joint of whatever the experimenters are doing and what the individual chooses to do with the experimenter’s directions (compliance needs a more careful definition). Interventions with targeting are liable to have thus more variable effects than without targeting and plausibly need to be reproduced more often before they used as policy.