Popularity bias -- the tendency to make choices that are more popular -- is a widespread behavior. We incorporate this bias into a dynamic model of a bipartite economy with heterogeneous agents, where each agent primarily cares about obtaining her optimal number of partners. We provide a full...

A problem that has plagued market failure discussions is: "why does bad policy exist and persist?" Various schools of thought have answered that question, but I argue that the explanations, while correct, are incomplete. In this paper, I apply the expert failure literature to the problem of...

There are works in the economic literature devoted to various aspects of digital platforms’ activities. At the same time, there no published studies examining digital platforms from the point of view of the institutional economy. The digital platform is viewed by the authors from an...

We introduce a simple two-stage game of endogenous network formation and information sharing for reasoning about the optimal design of social networks like Facebook or Google+. We distinguish between unilateral and bilateral connections and between targeted and collective information sharing....

We introduce a simple two-stage game of endogenous network formation and information sharing for reasoning about the optimal design of social networks like Facebook or Google+. We distinguish between unilateral and bilateral connections and between targeted and collective information sharing....

In many matching environments, agreements are multilateral and/or have externalities. We show that stability in these environments depends on agents' aggregate choice behavior. Two different conditions on aggregate choice ensure a stable outcome exists. One applies when contracts are...

Many markets rely on information intermediation to sustain cooperation between large communities. We identify a key trade-off in costly information intermediation: intermediaries can create trust by incentivizing information exchange, but with too much information acquisition, intermediation...

In this paper, we show that information trade has similar characteristics to a natural monopoly, where competition may be detrimental to efficiency due either to the duplication of direct costs or the slowing down of information dissemination. We present a model with two large populations in...

When banks extend loans to each other, they generate a negative externality in the form of systemic risk. They create a network of interbank exposures by which they expose other banks to potential insolvency cascades. In this paper, we show how a regulator can use information about the financial...