Whereas Senegal has long been sold as a showcase of democracy in Africa, including peaceful political alternance, things apparently changed fundamentally with the Senegalese presidentials of 2019 that brought new configurations. One of the major issues was political side-switching that has been...

Delegating the allocation of public resources to community members is an increasingly popular form of delivering development programs and are associated with a tradeoff between improved information about potential beneficiaries and favoritism towards local elites. Unlike targeting cash transfers...

Online social networks, such as Facebook, amplify the occasions for social comparisons which are detrimental to well-being. The authors test the hypothesis that the use of social networking sites (SNS) increases social comparisons using Italian data from the Multipurpose Household Survey, and...

There is growing evidence that face-to-face interaction is declining in many countries, exacerbating the phenomenon of social isolation. On the other hand, social interaction through online networking sites is steeply rising. To analyze these societal dynamics, we have built an evolutionary game...

We highlight that convergence in repeated averaging models commonly used to study cultural traits or opinion dynamics is not equivalent to convergence in Markov chain settings if transition matrices are time-varying. We then establish a new proof for the convergence of cultural traits in the...

Auf Basis einer qualitativen Analyse und Typisierung von 14 biographischen, 2013/14 durchgeführten Interviews mit von relativer Einkommensarmut betroffenen Menschen in städtischen und ländlichen Räumen Mecklenburg-Vorpommerns wird gezeigt, wie sich Armut im Alltag äußert. Weniger...

We study the influence of social networks on labor market transitions. We develop the first model where social ties and job status coevolve through time. Our key assumption is that the probability of formation of a new tie is greater between two employed individuals than between an employed and...

This paper provides a simple matching model in which unemployed workers and employers in large firms can be matched together through social networks or through more "formal" methods of search. We show that networks do not necessarily add new externalities and that some results previously...

Social network formation models are often compared by their network structures, which satisfy specific equilibrium or welfare properties. Here, we concentrate on welfare criteria and define properties of utility function which are causal for certain network structures. We hope the identification...

The mainly used welfare criterion in the social network literature is Bentham´s utilitarian concept. The shortcomings of this concept are well-known. We compare the outcomes of the utilitarian concept with the Nash social welfare function. By using a Taylor approximation we deduce a formula...