Some behaviors, ideas or technologies spread and become persistent in society, whereas others vanish. This paper analyzes the role of social influence in determining such distinct collective outcomes. Agents are assumed to acquire information from others through a certain sampling process that...

We propose a model where agents located in a social network decide whether or not to exert effort to provide a local public good. We assume that they have strong incentives to free-ride on their neighbors’ effort decisions. We characterize the equilibria of the induced game. We also study a...

This paper studies how a behavior spreads in a population. We consider a network of interacting agents whose actions are determined by the actions of their neighbors, according to a simple diffusion rule. We find, using a mean-field approach, the threshold for the spreading rate above which the...

This paper studies the problem of spreading a product (an idea or a technology) among agents in a social network. An agent obtains the product with a probability that depends on the spreading rate (or degree of contagion) of the product as well as on the behaviour of the agent?s neighbours. This...

We study a setting in which individual players choose their partners as well as a mode of behavior in 2 x 2 anti-coordination games -- games where a player's best response is to behave differently than the opponent. We characterize the nature of equilibrium networks as well as study the effects...

Some behaviors, ideas or technologies spread and become persistent in society, whereas others vanish. This paper analyzes the role of social influence in determining such distinct collective outcomes. Agents are assumed to acquire information from others through a certain sampling process, that...

We study the provision of a public good in a social network where links are directed, i.e., the information flows one way. Our results relate, through stochastic dominance, the equilibrium outcome of such a process with the out-degree distribution of the network.

We study the optimal management of teams in which agents’ effort decisions are mapped (via a production technology) into the probability of the team’s success. Optimal wage schemes in such context are largely discriminatory, but we show that the extent of the discrimination crucially depends...