Pablo Brañas‐GarzaRamón Cobo‐ReyesNatalia JiménezGiovanni Ponti2026-03-222026-03-222009https://andeanlibrary.org/handle/123456789/59999Citaciones: 1This work presents the design of a mechanism to elicit latent social networks. Subjects are invited to reveal their friends’ names, together with a “strength” (from acquaintance to friend) measuring the valuation of the relationship. According to the mechanism, subjects are rewarded with a fixed price either a) if the strengths of a randomly selected mutual link are sufficiently close or b) if they do not nominate anybody (our “exit-option” close). Our main results are that i) a very large percentage of links (72%) are reciprocated (99% of those with the required accuracy); ii) the mechanism largely captures strong friendship relations and practically ignores weak relations and iii) the accuracy of the elicitation mechanism is robust to the different reward means.enNOMINATEFriendshipMechanism (biology)Valuation (finance)PsychologySocial psychologyMicroeconomicsMathematical economicsComputer scienceEconomicsarticle