Identification of Binary Choice Models with Social Interactions

This paper provides a set of results on the econometric identifiability of binary choice models with social interactions. Social interactions models have achieved recent prominence as economic analyses have attempted to incorporate the social effects of group memberships in understanding individual decisionmaking. Our analysis moves beyond parametric identification results that have been obtained in the literature to consider the identifiability of model parameters when the distribution of random payoff terms is unknown. Further, we consider how identification is affected by the presence of unobservable payoff terms of various types as well as identification in the presence of certain forms of endogenous group membership. Our results suggest that identification may be achieved under assumptions that in certain contexts may be plausible