What makes an opinion leader: Expertise vs popularity

This paper studies learning through social networks in which agents update their beliefs by weighting those of their peers. We allow agents to pay little attention to peers with poor information at first, but more later on, as that peer acquires better information from more knowledgeable agents. We derive explicitly how social influence depends on agents' popularity (eigenvector centrality) and expertise (information precision) and show that even completely uninformed agents can contribute to social learning. In certain cases, providing better information to extremely popular agents may distract attention from the views of the experts, and lead society to worse assessments.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons .org /licenses /by /4 .0/).