Can we identify highly central individuals in a network without collecting network data, simply by asking community members? Can seeding information via such nominated individuals lead to significantly wider diffusion than {choosing} randomly chosen people, or even respected ones? In two...

We develop a model of information exchange through communication and investigate its implications for information aggregation in large societies. An underlying state determines payoffs from different actions. Agents decide which others to form a costly communication link with incurring the...

With the increasing ease with which information can be shared in social media, the issue of privacy has become central for the functioning of various online platforms. In this paper, we consider how privacy concerns affect individual choices in the context of a network formation game (where...

Members of different social groups often hold widely divergent public beliefs regarding the nature of the world in which they live. We develop a model that can accommodate such public disagreement, and use it to explore questions concerning the aggregation of distributed information and the...

A coordination game with incomplete information is played through time. In each period, payoffs depend on a fundamental state and an additional idiosyncratic shock. Fundamentals evolve according to a random walk where the changes in fundamentals (namely common shocks) have a fat tailed...

Under the assumption that individuals know the conditional distributions of signals given the payoff-relevant parameters, existing results conclude that as individuals observe infinitely many signals, their beliefs about the parameters will eventually merge. We first show that these results are...

In aggregative games, each player's payoff depends on her own actions and an aggregate of the actions of all the players (for example, sum, product or some moment of the distribution of actions). Many common games in industrial organization, political economy, public economics, and...

We provide an overview of recent research on belief and opinion dynamics in social networks. We discuss both Bayesian and non-Bayesian models of social learning and focus on the implications of the form of learning (e.g., Bayesian vs. non-Bayesian), the sources of information (e.g., observation...

We provide a model to investigate the tension between information aggregation and spread of misinformation in large societies (conceptualized as networks of agents communicating with each other). Each individual holds a belief represented by a scalar. Individuals meet pairwise and exchange...