This paper is a critical introduction to the new wave of economic literature on the effect of social interactions on individual behavior and aggregate economic outcomes. I refer to this research program, also known as new social economics, as the socioeconomic analysis of behavior, to...

Laws and policies designed to harness self-regarding preferences to public ends may fail when they compromise the beneficial effects of pro-social preferences. Experimental evidence indicates that incentives that appeal to self interest may reduce the salience of intrinsic motivation,...

This paper investigates how employment intermediaries affected the inter-firm network of worker mobility in an region of Italy in response of the reform that first allowed for temporary employment agencies in 1997. We map worker reallocations from a matched employer-employee dataset onto a...

Studies in the social capital literature have documented two stylised facts: first, a decline in measures of social participation has occurred in many OECD countries. Second, and more recently, the success of social networking sites (SNSs) has resulted in a steep rise in online social...

This paper tackles the issue of self-selection in social interactions models. I develop a theory of sorting and behavior, when the latter is subject to social influences, extending the model developed by Brock and Durlauf (2001a, 2003) to allow for equilibrium group formation. Individuals choose...

The Prisoner Dilemma is a typical structure of interaction in human societies. In spite of a long tradition dealing with the matter from different perspectives, the emergence of cooperation or defection still remains a controversial argument from both empirical and theoretical point of views. In...

This papers investigates the efficiency of aggregate choice in the long run when the individual decision is driven by both personal experience and imitation. Personal experience is represented by choice sets depending upon previous choices. Imitation is modeled first through popularity weighting...

When renegotiation under incomplete contracts follows the outside option principle, hold-up may occur as the ex-post degree of competition increases on investor’s side. However, under this framework, asset specificity may play the counterintuitive role of an entry deterrence device, thus...

This paper contributes to the knowledge-incentive based explanation of R&D networks. It argues that knowledge overlap and novelty are complementary inputs of any R&D alliance, and the complementarity coefficients depend on the incremental or radical nature of the research activity. The relation...