We examine whether social networks facilitate online markets using data from a leading peer-to-peer lending website. We find that borrowers with social ties are consistently more likely to have their loans funded and receive lower interest rates; however, most borrowers with social ties are more...

Throughout much of the developing world, politicians rely on political brokers to buy votes prior to elections. We investigate how social networks help facilitate vote-buying exchanges by combining village network data of brokers and voters with broker reports of vote buying. We show that...

In this paper, we investigate political communications in social networks characterized both by homophily–a tendency to associate with similar individuals–and group size. To generate testable hypotheses, we develop a simple theory of information diffusion in social networks with homophily...

Online reviews are a powerful means of propagating the reputations of products, services, and even employers. However, existing research suggests that online reviews often suffer from selection bias—people with extreme opinions are more motivated to share them than people with moderate...

A large and growing literature has used patent and patent citation data to measure knowledge spillovers across inventions and organizations, but relatively few papers in this literature have explicitly considered the collaboration networks formed by inventors as a mechanism for shaping and...

Social relationships channel information, influence, and access to scarce resources. As a consequence, social networks – the patterns of these relationships across the members of a community – influence who comes up with important innovations, whether and how rapidly those innovations get...

We conduct a field experiment with 1,300 participants in India to measure whether individuals save more when information about their savings is regularly shared with another member of their village (a “monitor”). We focus on whether the monitor's effectiveness depends on her social network...