Economic agents care about their relative well-being, and the comparisons are usually local. We capture this using a network model, in which an agent's payoff depends on the ranking of their allocation among their network neighbors. Given a network, an allocation is called α-stable if no...

Economic agents often care about their relative well-being: they compare with their neighbors in a social network. In this case, which network structures permit stable allocations? We construct a model in which agents' payoffs depend on the ranking of their allocations among the payoffs of their...

We analyze a market for microfinance in a region of a developing nation in which all projects are either of high or low quality. There is adverse selection because only borrowers know whether their project is of high or low quality but the microfinance institutions (MFIs) do not. The MFIs are...

In this note we analyze a game of marital infidelity. The husband can either be faithful to or cheat on his wife. The wife can either monitor or not monitor her husband. We first determine the best response correspondences of the two players. Second, we explain why there is no pure-strategy Nash...