Studies in the social capital literature have documented two stylised facts: first, a decline in measures of social participation has occurred in many OECD countries. Second, and more recently, the success of social networking sites (SNSs) has resulted in a steep rise in online social...

We explore how participation in social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter affects the most economically relevant aspect of social capital, trust. We use measures of trust in strangers (or social trust), trust in neighbours and trust in the police. We address endogeneity in the...

Studies in the social capital literature have documented two stylised facts: first, a decline in measures of social participation has occurred in many OECD countries. Second, and more recently, the success of social networking sites (SNSs) has resulted in a steep rise in online social...

We survey the literature on social networks by putting together the economics, sociological and physics/applied mathematics approaches, showing their similarities and differences. We expose, in particular, the two main ways of modeling network formation. While the physics/applied mathematics...

I provide a typology of social capital, breaking it down into seven more fundamental forms of capital: information capital, brokerage capital, coordination and leadership capital, bridging capital, favor capital, reputation capital, and community capital. I discuss how most of these forms of...

This article deals with the influence of cultural background on the sources of social capital. We analyse four different culture groups – Czechs and Russians representing post-modernized cultures and Dagestanis and Chechens representing traditional cultures. Applying univariate comparisons and...

We analyze the diffusion of rival information in a social network. In our model, rational agents can share information sequentially, unconstrained by an exogenous protocol or timing. We show how to compute the set of eventually informed agents for any network, and show that it is essentially...

The rise and popularity of online social networks is a recent phenomenon. In this study, we analyze the reasons and mechanisms behind the collapse of an online social network (OSN), iWiW. Significant cascading mechanisms have been identified in the pattern of abandoning the site at its peak of...

Paper models lender's decision based on project riskiness, trust from borrower's socioeconomic network, and social cost of default for the borrower. The paper suggests a methodology to estimate aggregate level of trustworthiness of borrower in socio-economic network. Our model links the social...

Trust and participation in social networks are inherently interrelated. We make use of India's demonetization policy, an unexpected and unforeseeable exogenous variation, to causally identify the effect of social networks in determining trust. We use first-hand quantitative and qualitative data...