Estimating Policy Effects in a Social Network with Independent Set Sampling

Evaluating the impact of policy interventions on respondents who are embedded in a social network is often challenging due to the presence of network interference within the treatment groups, as well as between treatment and non-treatment groups throughout the network. In this paper, we propose a modeling strategy that combines existing work on stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOM) with a novel network sampling method based on the identification of independent sets. By assigning respondents from an independent set to the treatment, we are able to block any spillover of the treatment and network influence, thereby allowing us to isolate the direct effect of the treatment from the indirect network-induced effects, in the immediate term. As a result, our method allows for the estimation of both the direct as well as the net effect of a chosen policy intervention, in the presence of network effects in the population. We perform a comparative simulation analysis to show that our proposed sampling technique leads to distinct direct and net effects of the policy, as well as significant network effects driven by policy-linked homophily. This study highlights the importance of network sampling techniques in improving policy evaluation studies and has the potential to help researchers and policymakers with better planning, designing, and anticipating policy responses in a networked society.