Using a simple model with interdependent utilities, we study how social networks influence individual voluntary contributions to the provision of a public good. Departing from the standard model of public good provision, we assume that an agent's utility has two terms: (a) ‘ego'-utility...

Social networks display homophily and clustering, and are usually sparse. I develop and estimate a structural model of strategic network formation with heterogeneous players and latent community structure, whose equilibrium networks are sparse and exhibit homophily and clustering. Each player...

We relate tax evasion behavior to a substantial literature on self and social comparison in judgements. Tax payers engage in tax evasion as a means to boost their expected consumption relative to others in their “local” social network, and relative to past consumption. The unique Nash...

We introduce a price oligopoly model with informed and uninformed consumers, thus creating a new channel of influence for collaborative R&D. Firms can establish pair-wise collaborative research links with other firms to lower production costs. Informed consumers buy from the lowest cost firms...

I propose a social learning model that investigates how confirmatory bias affects public opinion when agents exchange information over a social network. For that, besides exchanging opinions with friends, individuals observe a public sequence of potentially ambiguous signals and they interpret...

Homophily is the tendency of people to associate relatively more with those who are similar to them than with those who are not. In Golub and Jackson (2010a), we introduced degree-weighted homophily (DWH), a new measure of this phenomenon, and showed that it gives a lower bound on the time it...

The paper analyzes how the structure of social networks affects product diffusion and competition under different information regimes. Diffusion is modeled as the result of idiosyncratic adoption thresholds, local network effects, and information diffusion broadcasting and word-of mouth by...

This paper develops strategic foundations for an important statistical model of random networks with heterogeneous expected degrees. Based on this, we show how social networking services that subtly alter the costs and indirect benefits of relationships can cause large changes in behavior and...

A tragedy of the commons appears when the users of a common resource have incentives to exploit it more than the socially efficient level. We analyze the situation when the tragedy of the commons is embedded in a network of users and sources. Users play a game of extractions, where they decide...

There is empirical evidence suggesting that a person's family, friends, or social ties influence who a person votes for. Sokhey and McClurg (2012) find that as political disagreement in a person's social network increases, then a person is less likely to vote correctly. We develop a model where...