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Restrictive social norms and strategic constraints imposed by family members can limit women's access to and benefits from social networks, especially in patrilocal societies. We characterize young married women's social networks in rural India and analyze how inter-generational power dynamics within the household affect their network formation. Using primary data from Uttar Pradesh, we show that co-residence with the mother-in-law is negatively correlated with her daughter-in-law's mobility and ability to form social connections outside the household, especially those related to health, fertility, and family planning. Our findings suggest that the mother-in-law's restrictive behavior is potentially driven by the misalignment of fertility preferences between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. The lack of peers outside the household lowers the daughter-in-law's likelihood of visiting a family planning clinic and of using modern contraception. We find suggestive evidence that this is because outside peers (a) positively influence daughter-in-law's beliefs about the social acceptability of family planning and (b) enable the daughter-in-law to overcome mobility constraints by accompanying her to health clinics. Wiley Terms and Conditions, https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/licensing/self-archiving.html

Restrictive social norms and strategic constraints imposed by family members can limit women’s access to and benefits from social networks, especially in patrilocal societies. We characterize young married women’s social networks in rural India and analyze how inter-generational power dynamics within the household affect their network formation. Using primary data from Uttar Pradesh, India, we find that co-residence with the mother-in-law restricts her daughter-in-law’s mobility and ability to form social connections outside the household, especially those related to health, fertility, and family planning. These restrictions are mainly motivated by the misalignment of fertility preferences between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. Using an instrumental variables approach, we show that women who have fewer peers outside the household due to co-residence with the mother-in-law are less likely to visit a family planning clinic and to use modern contraception. We find suggestive evidence that these results operate through at least two channels of peer influence: outside peers alter a woman’s beliefs about the social acceptability of family planning (“information channel”) and help her overcome the mobility constraints imposed by her mother-in-law by accompanying her to the clinic (“companionship channel”).

A search engine ranks a set of documents according to their relevance for a specific query. Sev-eral ranking functions have been proposed. Although some are superior to others, there is no one known function known to dominate across all domains. Support Vector Machines is a mathemat-ically elegant technique that has been successfully implemented in many domains. In this paper we offer an intuitive intelligent data fusion approach that improves search results using Support Vector Machines. One important characteristic of this approach is that it considers underlying ranking functions as black-box algorithms and simply operates on the set of their results.

A search engine ranks a set of documents according to their relevance for a specific query. Several ranking functions have been proposed. Although some are superior to others, there is no one known function known to dominate across all domains. Support Vector Machines is a novel and mathematically elegant technique that has been successfully implemented in many domains. In this paper we offer an intuitive intelligent data fusion approach that improves search results using Support Vector Machines. One important characteristic of this approach is that it considers underlying ranking functions as black-box algorithms and simply operates on the set of their results.