Microfinance programmes provide poor people with small loans given to jointly liable self-selected groups. Follow-up loans provide incentives to repay. In an experiment we investigate the influence of those features on strategic default. Each group member invests in an individual risky project,...

Unexpected variation in emissions can have an enormous impact on the prices of emission permits and the efficiency achieved in tradable permit markets. Shocks to emission levels can be correlated across firms; for example, most firms require more emission permits than planned for following a...

It is a well-established fact that corruption is a widespread phenomenon. An important aspect of corruption is that two parties act jointly in order to further their own interests at the expense of a third party. The response of the third party has a significant impact on the persistence of...

We report results of an internet experiment designed to test the theory of informational cascades in financial markets. More than 6000 subjects, including a subsample of 267 consultants from an international consulting firm, participated in the experiment. As predicted by theory, we find that...

In this paper we adopt Granovetter's view expressed in his famous article ''Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness'' , where he argues that the concept of man in economics is extremely undersocialized because it ignores the importance of social networks. In so doing...

The importance of social trust on economic growth has been suggested by many empirical works. This paper formalizes the concept of social trust and studies its formation process in a game theoretic setting. It provides plausible explanations for a wide range of empirical and experimental...

We model how excess demand or excess supply can be generated in the presence of a social network of interactions, where agents are subject to external information and individual incentives. In this context we study price fluctuations in financial markets under equilibrium. In particular, we...

In this paper, the link between community enforcement and co-operation in environments where trust is required is investigated. For this purpose, an assymetric trust game in which peer-to-peer sanctioning mechanisms are available is considered. Firstly, the outcome of this game is characterised...

Why are there such large differences in living arrangements across Western European countries? Conventional economic analyses have not been successful in explaining differences in living arrangements and particularly the dramatic increase in the fraction of young adults living with their parents...

We give necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of symmetric equilibrium without ties in common values auctions, with multidimensional independent types and no monotonic assumptions. When the conditions are not satisfied, we are still able to prove the existence of pure strategy...