We study some recent developments and challenges in the empirics of the effects of social networks. We focus in …

We survey the literature on social networks by putting together the economics, sociological and physics … network formation. While the physics/applied mathematics approach is capable of reproducing most observed networks, it does … not explain why they emerge. On the contrary, the economics approach is very precise in explaining why networks emerge but …

-player policy turns out to be much more complex since it depends on wages and on the structure of the network. -- Social networks …

We study spillover effects within co-offending networks by leveraging deaths of co-offenders for causal identification …

networks, such coordination may be very difficult to achieve and may depend on the communication technology and the network … structure. We examine how pre-play communication and clustering within networks affect coordination in a challenging … experimental game on eight-person networks. Free-form chat is enormously effective in achieving the nonequilibrium efficient …

experiment whether gossip affects the efficiency of human interactions. We let subjects play a trust game. Third parties observe … possibility of gossip is highly efficiency-increasing compared to a situation without any gossip. In two further control … treatments, we show that the mere fact of being observed by third parties cannot explain the efficiency-increasing effect of …