While interest in social determinants of individual behavior has led to a rich theoretical literature and many efforts to measure these influences, a mature “social econometrics” has yet to emerge. This chapter provides a critical overview of the identification of social interactions. We...

We analyze students' cheating behavior during a national evaluation test. We model the mechanisms that trigger cheating interactions between students and show that, when monitoring is not sufficiently accurate, a social multiplier may magnify the effects on students' achievements. We exploit a...

The identification problems of general peer effect models have been studied in depth. But cognitive achievement studies suffer two additional sources of bias that arise because the behavioral variable - student effort - is unobserved. This paper studies both sources of bias and analyzes the...

This paper presents a multinomial choice model with social interactions in an incomplete network. Individuals form heterogenous rational expectations about the behavior of peers by taking into account their characteristics and the strength of their ties. We show the network conditions under...

Many real-life settings of consumer-choice involve social interactions, causing targeted policies to have spillover-effects. This paper develops novel empirical tools for analyzing demand and welfare-effects of policy-interventions in binary choice settings with social interactions. Examples...

In social interaction models, the identification of the network effect is based on either group size variation, structure of the network or the relative position in the network measured by the Bonacich centrality measure. These identification strategies imply the use of many instruments or...

The literature documents that job satisfaction is positively correlated with worker performance and productivity. We examine whether aggregate job satisfaction in a certain labor market environment can have an impact on individual-level job satisfaction. If the answer is yes, then policies...

This paper explores gender peer effects heterogeneity in adolescent Body Mass Index (BMI). We propose a utility-based non-cooperative social network model with effort technology. We allow the gender composition to influence peer effects. We analyze the possibility of recovering the fundamentals...

Social interactions within neighborhoods, schools and detention facilities are important determinants of criminal behavior. However, little is known about the degree to which neighborhood peers affect successful community re-entry following incarceration. This paper measures the influence of...

We develop a dynamic model of discrete choice that incorporates peer effects into random consideration sets. We characterize the equilibrium behavior and study the empirical content of the model. In our setup, changes in the choices of friends affect the distribution of the consideration sets....