I study a one-way flow connections model in which players are heterogeneous with respect to values and the costs of establishing a link. I first show that values and costs asymmetries are crucial in determining the level of connectedness of a network. Interestingly, unconnected equilibria are...

A fundamental question in social sciences is how trust emerges. We provide an answer which relies on the formation of social and economic relationships. We argue that behind trust lies the fact that individuals invest in connections taking into account the potential externalities networks...

This paper characterizes the set of equilibrium networks in the two-way flow model of network formation with small decay, and this for all increasing benefit functions of the players. We show that as long as the population is large enough, this set contains large- as well as small-diameter...

When workers send applications to vacancies they create a network. Frictions arise because workers typically do not know where other workers apply to and firms do not know which candidates other firms consider. The first coordination friction affects network formation, while the second...

What determines remittances – altruism or enlightened self-interest - and do remittances trigger additional migration? These two questions are examined empirically in Egypt, Turkey and Morocco for households with family members living abroad. Results show, first, that one cannot clearly...

Many networks such as the Internet have been found to possess scale-free and small-world network properties reflected by so-called power law distributions. Scale-free properties evolve in large complex networks through self-organizing processes and more specifically, preferential attachment. New...

Many economic organizations have some relational structure, meaning that economic agents do not only differ with respect to certain individual characteristics such as wealth and preferences, but also belong to some relational structure in which they usually take different positions. Two examples...

Policy makers spend large amounts of public resources on the foundation of science parks and other forms of geographically clustered business activities, in order to stimulate regional innovation. Underlying the relation between clusters and innovation is the assumption that co-located firms...

The Nash bargaining solution of a modified bargaining problem in the contract space yields the pair of stationary subgame perfect equilibrium proposals in the alternating offers model, also for positive time between proposals. As time vanishes, convergence to the Nash bargaining solution is...

We study participation games with negative feedback, i.e. games where players choose either to participate in a certain project or not and where the payoff for participating decreases in the number of participating players. We use the replicator dynamics to model the competition between...