Helping Behavior in Networked Organizations

This article studies a networked organization in which agents work to directly increase the team’s output and help neighbors to reduce the disutility of working. I establish the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium of a two-stage game in which agents first decide how much helping effort to give to each neighbor, and, then, how much effort to expend to directly benefit the team. I show that dense networks might not necessarily sustain a higher level of help, because links might be redundant. If the agents are homogeneous, the network in which they are pairwise connected is the most efficient