This paper models the dynamic process through which a large society may succeed in building up its social capital by establishing a stable and dense pattern of interaction among its members. In the model, agents interact according to a collection of infinitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemmas played...

We study perfect Bayesian equilibria of a sequential social learning model in which agents in a network learn about an underlying state by observing neighbors' choices. In contrast with prior work, we do not assume that the agents' sets of neighbors are mutually independent. We introduce a new...

Empirical studies of labor markets show that social contacts are an important source of job-related information [Ioannides and Loury (2004)]. At the same time, wage differences among workers may be explained only in part by differences in individual background characteristics. Such findings...

We study a randomly-assigned program providing information on U.S. settlement for new Filipino immigrants. The intervention, a 2.5-hour pre-departure training and an accompanying paper handbook, has no effect on employment, settlement, and subjective wellbeing, but leads immigrants to acquire...

Inaccurate beliefs about social norms can reduce useful social interactions and adversely affect an individual's ability to deal with negative shocks. We implement a randomized controlled trial with low-income workers in urban India who lack access to formal financial and healthcare support. We...

Recent uprisings in the Arab world consist of individuals revealing vastly different preferences than were expressed prior to the uprisings. This paper sheds light on the general mechanisms underlying large-scale social and institutional change. We employ an agent-based model to test the impact...

This paper studies social learning and optimal pricing in the presence of location-based social networks, such as Foursquare. We provide an analytic model to resolve the following questions: (1) What is the optimal pricing strategy in location-based networks? (2) How do different pricing...

Information aggregation mechanisms are designed explicitly for collecting and aggregating dispersed information. An excellent example of the use of this "wisdom of crowds" is a prediction market. The purpose of our Twitter-based prediction market is to suggest that carefully designed market...

We study evolutionary learning processes through social networks. We show that network heterogeneity, in particular scale-freeness, enhances social learning by studying a model in which an agent set on a network imitates the strategy only from the neighborhood. Further, in order to determine...

We study learning and influence in a setting where agents communicate according to an arbitrary social network and naively update their beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of their neighbors' opinions. A focus is on conditions under which beliefs of all agents in large societies...