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...

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...

In this paper, we argue that an important function fulfilled by intermediaries is to facilitate trust by enabling social pressure towards the enforcement of informal agreements. To that end, we develop a new model that uses network theory to show that intermediaries who have exclusivity over a...