This article discusses two applications of social network theory to employment and social policies. Job contact networks help workers find jobs and risk-sharing networks help villagers in developing countries insure against illness and idiosyncratic shocks. In both applications, recent advances...

Various forms of social learning and network effects are at work on crowdfunding platforms, giving rise to informational and payoff externalities. We use novel entrepreneur-backer data to study how these externalities shape funding dynamics, within and across projects. We find that backers...

In many markets, user benefits depend on participation and usage decisions of other users giving rise to network effects. Intermediaries manage these network effects and thus act as platforms that bring users together. This paper reviews key findings from the literature on network effects and...