Gordon Tullock has been one of the most important founders and contributors to Public Choice. Two innovations are typical “Tullock Challenges”. The first relates to method: the measurement of subjective well-being, or happiness. The second relates to digital social networks such as Facebook,...

Migration contributes to the circulation of goods, knowledge, and ideas. Using community and individual-level data from Moldova, we show that the emigration episode that started in the late 1990s strongly affected political preferences and electoral outcomes in Moldova during the following...

Recently collected data show that, within any manufacturing industry, vertically integrated firms tend to have larger, higher productivity plants, account for the bulk of sales, and also sell externally most of the inputs they produce. In a weak contracting environment characteristic of...

A random intersection graph is constructed by independently assigning each vertex a subset of a given set and drawing an edge between two vertices if and only if their respective subsets intersect. In this paper a model is developed in which each vertex is given a random weight, and vertices...

The citation network of the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM) is examined from 1981 to 1995. We propose a model that contains log-linear and logmultiplicative terms to estimate simultaneously the importance, cohesion, and structural equivalence of journals in the network...

Recently a variety of link-based stability concepts have emerged in the literature on game theoretic models of social network formation.We investigate two basic formation properties that establish equivalence between some well known types of stable networks and their natural extensions.These...

Merchant guilds have been portrayed as “social networks“ that generated beneficial “social capital“ by sustaining shared norms, effectively transmitting information, and successfully undertaking collective action. This social capital, it is claimed, benefited society as a whole by...

This paper analyzes an early modern German economy to test alternative theories about guilds. It finds little evidence to support recent hypotheses arguing that guilds corrected market failures relating to product quality, training, and innovation. But it finds that guilds were social networks...

This paper links the two nascent economic literatures on social networks and cultural assimilation by investigating the evolution of population attributes in a simple model where agents are influenced by their acquaintances. The main conclusion of the analysis is that attributes converge to a...