It has been widely recognized that the poor spends a significant proportion of their income on social spending even at the expense of basic consumption. What are the motives behind the observed lavish social spending among the poor? We attempt to test three competing explanations at the social...

We develop topological analysis of social-network effect on game equilibrium in the context of two- player asymmetric normal-form games and also in evolutionary sense. Firstly, it is confirmed that the game equilibrium in many social networks cannot be established through that in a well-mixed...

In this paper we test the celebrated `Strength of weak ties' theory of Granovetter (1973). We test two hypotheses on the network structure in a data set of collaborating economists. While we find support for the hypothesis of transitivity of strong ties, we reject the hypothesis that weak ties...

In nationally representative household data from the 2008 wave of the Rural to Urban Migration in China survey, nearly two thirds of rural-urban migrants found their employment through family members, relatives, friends or acquaintances. This paper investigates why the use of social network to...

It is a challenging task to understand the complex dependency structures in an ultra-high dimensional network, especially when one concentrates on the tail dependency. To tackle this problem, we consider a network quantile autoregres- sion model (NQAR) to characterize the dynamic quantile...

We discuss a social decision making model in which individuals, represented by nodes, interact with each other through ties in a social network. Each node takes its decisions considering a set of points of view in a multiple criteria decision making perspective. Our model suggests the interplay...

When preparing a research article, academics engage in informal intellectual collaboration by asking their colleagues for feedback. This collaboration gives rise to a social network between academics. We study whether informal intellectual collaboration with an academic who is more central in...

We contribute to the literature on relative age effects on pupils' (non-cognitive) skills formation by studying students' social network. We investigate data on European adolescents from the Health Behaviour in School Aged Children survey and use an instrumental variables approach to account for...

Peer effects in innovation adoption decisions have been extensively studied. However, the underlying mechanisms of peer effects are generally not explicitly accounted for. Gaps in this knowledge could lead to misestimation of peer effects and inefficient interventions. This study examined the...