Peer Selection Research Articles

Peer Effects in the Scotch Whisky Industry: A Test of Three Selection Mechanisms

The question facing managers when confronted with irreversible investment decisions is what framework they should choose to assess risks? Research suggests that managers may forgo the cognitive effort of building predictive models in favour of doing what their industry peers do. There is extensive empirical support for this so-called “peer effect”. However, the peers in peer-effect studies are usually identified by the researchers before testing the effect. In this paper, we do not identify peers but focus on alternative criteria that firms in the same industry may use to select peers. We argue that the literature points to three possible peer selection mechanisms: Regional cluster identity, similar resource size, and product market rivalry. We test these mechanisms using data on capacity expansion decisions by 117 distilleries from the Scotch Whisky industry from 1950-2010. We find that regional cluster identity and resource size are used to identify peers, but not product market competition.

Peer Relationships and Indonesian Muslim Adolescents' Religiosity and Religious Coping: Selection and Influence.

The religious similarity of adolescents and their friends can arise from selection or influence. Prior studies were limited because of confounds that arose from the ethnic and religious heterogeneity of the samples and the use of cross-sectional designs. SIENA was used in this two-year longitudinal study of 825 Indonesian Muslim high school students (445 girls; mean age = 16.5 years) to assess peer selection and influence as these pertained to religiosity and religious coping. The analyses yielded significant influence but not selection effects for both religiosity and religious coping. This study is an important methodological advance over prior research and although limited by correlational data, nevertheless, provides evidence that adolescents influence their peers' religiousness.

Merging the peer selection and peer influence effects: Can neutralization beliefs and cognitive impulsivity serve as links in the chain?

The commonly cited connection between peer influence and peer selection effects was explored in an effort to understand whether cognitive distortion, as represented by neutralization beliefs and cognitive impulsivity, plays a role in linking the peer influence and peer selection effects to each other. Participants were 3568 children (51.3% female) enrolled in the longitudinal portion of the Gang Resistance Education and Training study. Data from five waves of Gang Resistance Education and Training were organized into a series of paths and subjected to multilevel multiple regression longitudinal analysis, where data were clustered by classroom. Two principal analyses were performed. In the first analysis, peer delinquency and participant delinquency were cross-lagged to form four prospective peer selection paths (delinquency → peer delinquency) and four prospective peer influence paths (peer delinquency → delinquency). These paths were then subjected to multilevel (complex sampling design) multiple regression analysis, controlling for age, sex, race, group status, and the most proximal prior measure of the outcome variable. Seven of the eight paths proved significant. In the second analysis, neutralization beliefs and cognitive impulsivity were included in the middle wave of the five-wave model, controlling once again for age, sex, race, group status, and the proximal autoregressive path of the outcome variable. The results of this second analysis revealed that both neutralization beliefs and cognitive impulsivity mediated the connection running from peer selection to peer influence, although neither mediated the peer influence-to-peer selection chain. The direct effects for delinquency and peer delinquency across the five waves were also significant. These findings suggest that the peer selection and influence effects are interdependent, reciprocal, and linked, in part, by cognitive distortion.

Managing the offender-to-victim transition with parental support, low neighborhood disorder, positive school culture, and moral cognition: protective and promotive factors and the person proximity effect

ABSTRACT Victim-offender overlap is examined from the standpoint of offending leading to victimization by way of the peer selection effect, routines activities and lifestyle choice, and person proximity. The current investigation focused on the potential role of protective and promotive factors in managing the offender-to-victim transition. Participants were 1,760 juveniles from the British-based longitudinal Offending, Crime and Justice Survey (OCJS) who were under the age of 18 at the start of the study. Three waves of data were analyzed, the preliminary results of which confirmed the person proximity effect (offending → peer delinquency → victimization). Although four potential protective/promotive factors (parental support, low neighborhood disorder, positive school culture, and moral cognition) failed to interact with the first two variables in the person proximity sequence (i.e. offending and peer delinquency), there was some evidence of a promotive effect for two of these factors. Parental support, for instance, produced a modest deterrent effect on Wave 2 peer delinquency, whereas low neighborhood disorder directly reduced the incidence of victimization. Even with these promotive effects, the person proximity effect remained intact. Further research is required to replicate the present findings and identify additional protective/promotive variables that may help mitigate the person proximity effect.

Balanced wireless crowd charging with mobility prediction and social awareness

The advancements in peer-to-peer wireless power transfer (P2P-WPT) have empowered the portable and mobile devices to wirelessly replenish their battery by directly interacting with other nearby devices. The existing works unrealistically assume the users to exchange energy with any of the users and at every such opportunity. However, due to the users’ mobility, the inter-node meetings in such opportunistic mobile networks vary, and P2P energy exchange in such scenarios remains uncertain. Additionally, the social interests and interactions of the users influence their mobility as well as the energy exchange between them. The existing P2P-WPT methods did not consider the joint problem for energy exchange due to user’s inevitable mobility, and the influence of sociality on the latter. As a result of computing with imprecise information, the energy balance achieved by these works at a slower rate as well as impaired by energy loss for the crowd. Motivated by this problem scenario, in this work, we present a wireless crowd charging method, namely MoSaBa, which leverages mobility prediction and social information for improved energy balancing. MoSaBa incorporates two dimensions of social information, namely social context and social relationships, as additional features for predicting contact opportunities. In this method, we explore the different pairs of peers such that the energy balancing is achieved at a faster rate as well as the energy balance quality improves in terms of maintaining low energy loss for the crowd. We justify the peer selection method in MoSaBa by detailed performance evaluation. Compared to the existing state-of-the-art, the proposed method achieves better performance trade-offs between energy-efficiency, energy balance quality and convergence time.

SMART: A Subspace based Malicious Peers Detection algorithm for P2P Systems

In recent years, reputation management schemes have been proposed as promising solutions to alleviate the blindness during peer selection in distributed P2P environment where malicious peers coexist with honest ones. They indeed provide incentives for peers to contribute more resources to the system and thus promote the whole system performance. But few of them have been implemented practically since they still suffer from various security threats, such as collusion, Sybil attack and so on. Therefore, how to detect malicious peers plays a critical role in the successful work of these mechanisms, and it will also be our focus in this paper. Firstly, we define malicious peers and show their influence on the system performance. Secondly, based on Multiscale Principal Component Analysis (MSPCA) and control chart, a Subspace based MAlicious peeRs deTecting algorithm (SMART) is brought forward. SMART first reconstructs the original reputation matrix based on subspace method, and then finds malicious peers out based on Shewhart control chart. Finally, simulation results indicate that SMART can detect malicious peers efficiently and accurately.

The development of peer networks and academic performance in learning communities in higher education

In learning communities, students share their knowledge which might contribute to academic performance. This study disentangles peer selection from influence processes in modelling first-year students’ academic performance after the transition to university. Longitudinal peer network data were obtained from 95 bachelor students at two time points in a social sciences study programme with eight learning communities. Using co-evolution modelling in RSiena, we found that students help each other more often when they are already friends and students who help each other academically are more likely to become friends. The higher a student performs, the more often the student is selected as a friend or as an academic helper and the more often this higher-performing student initiates friendship and academic help relationships. Although learning communities are often implemented to enhance academic performance, we did not find evidence that peer relationships in learning communities influence academic performance.

The co‐evolution of friendship, defending behaviors, and peer victimization: A short‐term longitudinal social network analysis

AbstractPeers are critical influencers of adolescent behavior, including defending against peer victimization. The current research explored peer influence processes associated with four different types of peer‐defending behaviors (comforting, reporting, solution‐focused, and aggressive defending behaviors) within early adolescent friendship networks. Links with peer victimization, friendship ties, and gender were also explored. Data were collected from 334 early adolescents ages 11–14 in Canada. Participants self‐reported on defending behaviors, victimization, and friendships over two time‐points, 8–10 weeks apart. Data were analyzed using Stochastic Actor‐Oriented Models (SAOMs). After controlling for friendship network structure and peer selection for defending behaviors, results indicated significant peer socialization effects for comforting, reporting, and solution‐focused defending. For solution‐focused defending only, the peer socialization effect was significantly stronger for girls than for boys. There were no significant selection effects across defending behaviors. In terms of social outcomes, youth with higher levels of reporting tended to have higher levels of peer victimization (and vice versa). Peer victimization was also positively associated with aggressive defending. Defending behaviors were generally unrelated to changes in friendship ties. Overall, these results highlight how friendships contribute to the development of peer‐defending behaviors and emphasize the need to examine defending as a multidimensional behavior.

Toward Quantifying Decentralization of Blockchain Networks With Relay Nodes

In this paper, we present a methodology for quantifying the decentralization degree of a blockchain network. To accomplish this, we use two well-known graph models of Erdös-Rény and Barabási–Albert in order to study the blockchain network topology. We then quantify the decentralization degree using the clustering coefficient of our network models. We validate our approach through extensive simulations and analyze the decentralization degree with respect to network parameters such as the number of connections per node and the peer selection algorithm. Our results expose the trade-off between the average shortest path and the decentralization degree. Furthermore, we observe the impact of the average shortest path on the network speed and traffic overhead. Finally, we demonstrate that the presence of hub-like nodes such as relay gateways negatively impacts the decentralization degree of blockchain networks.

A Portrait of Peers Within Peer-Mediated Interventions: A Literature Review

Although the impact of peer-mediated interventions on students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) has been studied extensively, little attention has focused on the peers without disabilities who are so central to these interventions. We reviewed 98 studies to examine the portrait of more than 3,000 peers without disabilities who have participated in peer-mediated interventions involving middle and high school students with IDD. Peer and student demographics were very diverse, as were the methods for peer recruitment and selection, the interventions they delivered, the settings in which they spent time with students with IDD, and the ways in which they were prepared for these roles. However, reporting in these areas was limited across studies. We offer recommendations for strengthening research and practice focused on the contributions of peers within these evidence-based interventions.

Peer selection in opinion dynamics on signed social networks with stubborn individuals

This paper examines the impact of local peer selection on global opinion dynamics evolving on signed social networks, where both cooperative and antagonistic ties coexist. Specifically, we focus on how opinions of stubborn individuals can be efficiently learned by a signed social network using peer selection mechanism. First, we examine the correlation between the selection of influence anchors of stubborn individuals and the opinion formation of the signed social network. Then, we proceed to examine an eigenvector-based peer selection strategy and show how the strategy can be beneficial in the spreading efficiency of stubborn individuals’ opinions. Finally, how the local observations of peers’ opinions can be employed for peer selection is investigated, enabling a global opinion spreading efficiency enhancement through only local decision-making amongst social individuals. The application of the proposed peer selection strategy to the Friedkin-Johnsen opinion dynamics model on signed networks is discussed. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the theoretical results.

Group Lending with Peer Selection and Moral Hazard

The theory on group lending suggests that joint liability induces borrowers to form homogeneous groups based on their risk types, which alleviates adverse selection and contributes to the success of microcredit schemes. We extend this theory by allowing individuals to differ both in their exogenous risk type and in their endogenous effort level. We find that joint liability leads to positive assortative matching in both a non-cooperative and cooperative game setting. Groups of safe borrowers additionally exhibit higher effort levels, which reinforces their likelihood of repayment as opposed to risky groups.

A Supply Chain Traceability Scheme Based on Blockchain

The traditional supply chain management system generally uses the centralized server to store the data, which has the problems of opaque transaction information, high maintenance cost of the central server and low database security factor. In order to improve the transparency and security of data in the supply chain system, this paper uses blockchain technology for supply chain management. In addition, the cost of maintaining the anti-counterfeiting traceability platform in the traditional supply chain management system is very high, and the anti-counterfeiting code is easy to be stolen. In order to reduce the hardware cost of the anti-counterfeiting traceability platform, this paper designs a set of anti-counterfeiting traceability mechanism of supply chain products based on asymmetric encryption and digital signature technology, which improves the function of the system application layer. In order to reduce the hardware cost of the anti-counterfeiting traceability platform, this paper designs a set of anti-counterfeiting traceability mechanism of supply chain products based on asymmetric encryption and digital signature technology, which improves the function of the system application layer. In order to further improve the data processing efficiency and stability of blockchain network, this paper improves the master peer selection algorithm in fabric network.

A genetically-controlled, cross-lagged study of the association between friends' deviance and participants' delinquency during adolescence: A replication.

The goal of the present study was to replicate Burt et al. (2009) and Hou et al. (2013) findings by determining the contribution of peers' deviance to changes in participants' (monozygotic [MZ] twins') self-reported delinquency from mid- to late adolescence while controlling for possible gene-environment correlations (rGE) through the use of the cotwin method in the context of a cross-lagged design. Two separate samples were used to this purpose. The first sample included 289 MZ-twin pairs (48.42% female; 65.5% of European descent, 21.7% of African descent, 12.8% other; average age at first assessment = 16.20 years) and relied on perceived measures of peer deviance, as in the two original studies. The second sample comprised 181 MZ-twin pairs (50.67% female; 84% of European descent, 3% of African descent, 2% of Asian descent, 2% Native North Americans, and 9% unspecified; average age at first assessment = 13.05 years) and used direct measures to assess peers' deviance. Participants in the first sample were part of a large representative sample of American adolescents, whereas the second sample included families with twins born in a large Canadian city. Results showed that within-pair differences in self-reported delinquency were stable from midadolescence to late adolescence in both samples. As in Burt et al. (2009) and Hou et al. (2013) within-pair differences in peer deviance did not predict changes in within-pair differences in self-reported delinquency in both samples (i.e., no socialization effect). In contrast to Burt et al. (2009) and Hou et al. (2013), however, we found no predictive link from twins' self-reported delinquency to peers' deviance (i.e., no selection effect). Finally, as in Burt et al. (2009) we found that peers' deviance was stable from middle to late adolescence and that peers' deviance and participants' delinquency were cross-sectionally correlated in the first sample, but not in the second sample. These results are interpreted in the context of the ongoing debate in regard to peers' socialization vs selection effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Cannabis Use and Emotional Intelligence in Adolescents during COVID-19 Confinement: A Social Network Analysis Approach

Confinement by COVID-19 had negative consequences on adolescent mental health, including increased cannabis use. Cannabis is related to variables that influence health and well-being. Emotional Intelligence is associated with adaptive coping styles, peer relationships, and social–emotional competencies. In adolescence, peer selection plays a unique role in the initiation of substance use. However, there are no studies during a confinement stage that analyse the relationships between networks, Emotional Intelligence, and cannabis use. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyse the consumption and friendship networks of an adolescent classroom and their relationship with Emotional Intelligence, cannabis use, and gender during COVID-19 confinement. Participants completed different questionnaires for Emotional Intelligence, cannabis use, and the consumption and friendship network. The sample consisted of 21 students from 10th grade, of which 47.6% were consumers. The friendship network correlates with the consumption network, and significant associations between emotional repair and being a cannabis user. The regression model points to the friendship network as a significant variable in predicting the classroom use network. This study highlights the role of the Social Network Analysis in predicting consumption networks during a COVID-19 confinement stage and serves as a tool for cannabis use prevention interventions in a specific population.

A distributed soft sensors model for managing vague and uncertain multimedia communications using information fusion techniques

In wireless sensor networks it may occur that values cannot be measured directly by sensors or are costly. In those scenarios, the use of soft sensors is a promising solution, particularly when dealing with multimodal sensors that record multimedia information. In this paper we propose an approach in which soft sensors work by fusing the measured ozone level in outdoor air recorded by nearby hard sensors. We used a fusion technique based on the idea of favorite peer selection. The statistical indicators obtained indicate that our approach overcomes the baseline in 100% of cases analyzed in 3 different test scenarios.

Peer selection and valuation in mergers and acquisitions

Using unique data, this paper examines investment banks’ choice of peers in comparable companies analysis in mergers and acquisitions. We find strong evidence that product market space is amongst the most important factors in peer selection, but Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes, particularly three and four digit codes, do a poor job of categorizing related firms in this setting. Banks strategically select large, high growth peers with high valuation multiples, factors that are also positively related to premiums. Our evidence is consistent with target-firm advisors selecting peers with high valuation multiples to negotiate higher takeover prices.

Mapping and contesting peer selection in digitalized public sector benchmarking

AbstractThis paper investigates the influence of digitalization on different modes of peer selection in public sector benchmarking. We do so in the context of a field study of the impact of “Kolada”—a digital database and benchmarking device comparing the performance of Swedish municipalities. We find that the municipal quality controllers often used algorithmically selected peer groups to identify “pure” performance gaps for a range of performance indicators. Politicians, departmental managers, and the citizenry, however, continued to prefer benchmarking against neighboring municipalities. Drawing on Gieryn's concept of cultural cartography, differences in peer selection are characterized as a form of credibility contest between digitally generated and local maps. Our paper contributes to the literature in three main ways. First, we demonstrate how peer selection involves a mutual interplay between new digitally generated, abstract maps of performance and local cartographic legacies sustained by complex social attachments. Second, our paper illustrates the importance of often overlooked social ties informing processes of peer selection, highlighting the importance of professional ties, neighborly familiarity, and affective relations. Third, our paper characterizes the power of “native truths.” More generally, our paper indicates the epistemic authority of digital “truths” is contestable and may be resisted. Ultimately, the coexistence of “old” and new epistemic maps confers choice, which contributes to the legitimacy of new technologies enabling digitalized benchmarking to persist in shifting and locally meaningful ways.

Using Cooperative Physical Activities in Inclusive Settings to Enhance Social Interactions for Preschoolers With Autism Spectrum Disorder in China

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effects of cooperative physical activities on social interactions of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in China. Cooperative physical activities include procedures such as peer selection, peer practice, group task completion, and an interdependent group contingency. The intervention took place during inclusive physical education (PE) classes. Generalization of interactions with peers was evaluated during free play. Three preschool boys (ages 4–5 yrs) with ASD participated in the study, which used a multiple baseline design across the participants. Results indicated that the procedure effectively increased the frequency of appropriate peer interactions for all three children in the PE and free play settings. Although the frequency of inappropriate interactions increased after the intervention in both settings, the proportion of inappropriate interactions relative to appropriate interactions decreased for two children in the PE setting and for all three children in the free play setting.

Peer selection and influence for marijuana use in a complete network of first-year college students

BackgroundMarijuana is the most frequently used illicit drug among college students, and there is a need to understand the social processes that contribute to young adults’ marijuana use. Substance use behaviors tend to be more similar (homophilous) among individuals with social ties to one another. However, little is known about whether marijuana use homophily within young adult relationships is due to social selection (seeking out ties with similar marijuana use to one’s own) or social influence (adopting similar marijuana use behaviors as one’s ties), or both. Methods: Students (N = 1,489; 54.6% female; Mage = 18.6 years) at one University completed online surveys in their first three semesters of college. Surveys assessed participant characteristics, marijuana use, and ties to up to 10 other students in the whole (sociocentric) network of first-year college students. Stochastic-actor oriented models (SAOMs) were used to analyze the co-evolution of marijuana use and social ties over time. Results: Participants were more likely to select peers with similar past 30-day marijuana use as themselves. Concurrently, students’ past 30-day marijuana use became more similar to their peers’ use over time. Discussion: Evidence for selection and influence effects were highly significant after controlling for network structure and other covariates indicating these processes may work in tandem to increase marijuana use homophily over the first year of college. This highlights the importance of relationships made early in the first-year of college, as these initial peer ties are likely to reinforce marijuana use behaviors that occur within these relationships.