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...

This paper analyzes an entry timing game with uncertain entry costs. Two firms receive costless signals about the cost of a new project and decide when to invest. We characterize the equilibrium of the investment timing game with private and public signals. We show that competition leads the two...

This paper analyzes the optimal protection strategy for an innovator of a complex innovation who faces the risk of imitation by a competitor. We suppose that the innovation can be continuously fragmented into sub-innovations. We characterize the optimal mix of patent and trade secrets when the...

In liberalized network industries, entrants can either compete for service using the existing infrastructure (access) or deploy their own infrastructure capacity (bypass). In this paper, we demonstrate that, under the threat of bypass, the access price set by an unregulated and vertically...

This paper analyzes the assignment of durable objects to successive generations of agents who live for two periods. The optimal assignment rule is stationary, favors old agents and is determined by a selectivity function, which satisfies an iterative functional differential equation. More...