We survey the literatures on the economic consequences of the structure of social networks. We develop a taxonomy of 'macro' and 'micro' characteristics of social inter-action networks and discuss both the theoretical and empirical findings concerning the role of those characteristics in...

We provide an overview and synthesis of the literatures analyzing games where players are connected via a network structure. We study, in particular, the impact of the structure of the network on individuals’ behaviors. We focus on the game theoretic modeling, but also include some discussion...

We examine how participation in a microfinance program diffuses through social networks. We collected detailed demographic and social network data in 43 villages in South India before microfinance was introduced in those villages and then tracked eventual participation. We exploit exogenous...

We study (anti-) coordination problems in networks in a laboratory experiment. Participants interact with their neighbours in a fixed network to play a bilateral (anti-) coordination game. Our main treatment variable is the extent to which players are heterogeneous in the number of connections...

We examine how the speed of learning and best-response processes depends on homophily: the tendency of agents to associate disproportionately with those having similar traits. When agents' beliefs or behaviors are developed by averaging what they see among their neighbors, then convergence to a...

We develop a simple model to study the coevolution of interaction structures and action choices in Prisoners' Dilemma games. Agents are boundedly rational and choose both actions and interaction partners via payoff-based imitation. The dynamics of imitation and exclusion yields polymorphic...

We investigate the role of networks of alliances in preventing (multilateral) interstate wars. We first show that, in the absence of international trade, no network of alliances is peaceful and stable. We then show that international trade induces peaceful and stable networks: trade increases...

We study learning and influence in a setting where agents communicate according to an arbitrary social network and naively update their beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of their neighbors' opinions. A focus is on conditions under which beliefs of all agents in large societies...

Can we identify the members of a community who are best- placed to diffuse information simply by asking a random sample of in- dividuals? We show that boundedly-rational individuals can, simply by tracking sources of gossip, identify those who are most central in a network according to...

We study extrapolation between games in a laboratory experiment. Participants in our experiment first play either the dominance solvable guessing game or a Coordination version of the guessing game for five rounds. Afterwards they play a 3x3 normal form game for ten rounds with random matching...