Throughout much of the developing world, politicians rely on political brokers to buy votes prior to elections. We investigate how social networks help facilitate vote-buying exchanges by combining village network data of brokers and voters with broker reports of vote buying. We show that...

Agents often use noisy signals from their neighbors to update their beliefs about a state of the world. The effectiveness of social learning relies on the details of how agents aggregate information from others. There are two prominent models of information aggregation in networks: (1) Bayesian...

Absence of well-functioning formal institutions leads to reliance on social networks to enforce informal contracts. Social ties may aid cooperation, but agents vary in network centrality, and this hierarchy may hinder cooperation. To assess the extent to which networks substitute for...