This paper studies bilateral insurance schemes across networks of individuals. While transfers are based on social norms, each individual must have the incentive to abide by those norms, and so we investigate the structure of stable insurance networks, in which self-enforcement constraints are...

This paper presents a model of local network effects in which agents connected by a social network each value the adoption of a product by a heterogeneous subset of other agents in their 'neighborhood', and have incomplete information about the structure and strength of adoption...

We present a model of opinion formation where individuals repeatedly engage in discussion and update their opinion in a social network similarly to the DeGroot model. Abstracting from the standard assumption that individuals always report their opinion truthfully, agents in our model interact...

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...

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 discuss a fundamental and pervasive aspect of social networks that has a signfii cant impact on behavior: "homophily. "Homophily refers to the tendency of individuals to associate with others who have similar characteristics as themselves. This tendency has been observed across a variety of...

This paper applies for the first time power index analysis to the famous Krackhardt’s kite social network by imposing a weighted voting game on the given network structure. It compares the results of this analysis, derived by applying the Public Good Index and the Public Value, with the...

We study the incentives that agents have to invest in costly protection against cascading failures in networked systems. Applications include vaccination, computer security and airport security. Agents are connected through a network and can fail either intrinsically or as a result of the...

We study a DeGroot-like opinion dynamics model in which agents may oppose other agents. As an underlying motivation, in our setup, agents want to adjust their opinions to match those of the agents they follow (their 'in-group', friends, or those they trust) and, in addition, they want to adjust...

This work studies a strategic game with incomplete information in which a finite number of players simultaneously choose actions and form either unilaterally or bilaterally relationships. The players' payoffs are supermodular in actions but do exhibit neither negative nor positive spillovers;...