The behaviour of urban populations is compared with the systems directing behaviour in individuals. This is both a metaphor and a mechanistic parallel. The biological model draws upon recent developments in brain research and psychological and cultural anthropology. The development and operation...

This paper studies whether conformism behavior affects individual outcomes in crime. We present a social network model of peer effects with ex-ante heterogeneous agents and show how conformism and deterrence affect criminal activities. We then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed...

Many types of economic and social activities involve significant behavioral complementarities (peer effects) with neighbors in the social network. The same activities often exert externalities that cumulate in "stocks" affecting agents' welfare and incentives. For instance, smoking is subject to...

We exploit the randomized evaluation of a remedying education intervention that improved the reading skills of low-performing third grade students in Colombia, to study whether providing educational support to low-achieving students affects the academic performance of their higher-achieving...

We conducted a framed field experiment to explore a situation where individuals have potentially competing social identities to understand how group identification and socialization affect ingroup favoritism and out-group discrimination. The Dictator Game and the Trust Game were conducted in...

We introduce a new solution concept for models of coalition formation, called the myopic stable set. The myopic stable set is defined for a very general class of social environments and allows for an infinite state space. We show that the myopic stable set exists and is non-empty. Under minor...