Abstract: This paper attempts to understand the interplay between identity and network formations. We have observed that, in everyday life, a rational actor always 'chooses' one or more of its associates from several available options. For example, when in a public transport, a passenger is choosing a seat among all the available seats, or when an under-graduate student is deciding on the supervisor for her graduate studies, these actions result from conscious choices that an actor makes. Our hypothesis is that, an actor's conscious choices emerge from a specific choice structure and this choice structure is never independent of the actor's identity. In this paper, we analyse the results of a survey in order to model the preference structure that determines the pattern of human network formations.

Brief bio: Anirban Ghatak is an Assistant Professor at Indian Institute of Management Visakhapatnam. He has done his PhD on Evolutionary Game Theory from the department of Industrial Engineering & Operations Research at IIT Bombay.  He has worked as a Visiting Scientist at the Interdisciplinary Statistical Research Unit of Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata. He has taught at IIM Indore, IIM Amritsar, and MICA Ahmedabad as a Visiting Faculty. He also works as a consultant with private sector enterprises in the areas of Digital Marketing and Data Analytics. His research interest lies in economic modelling of human behaviour. He works in Mechanism Design, Evolutionary Game Theory and Behavioural Economics. His current topics of research include generating trust in sharing economy, developing a theory of asymmetric evolutionary games under type-specific resource constraints among other topics.