The focus of this paper is the endogenous formation of peer groups. In our model agents choose peers before making contributions to public projects, and they differ in how much they value one project relative to another. Thus, the group's preference composition affects the type of contributions...

We combine survey data on friendship networks and individual characteristics with experimental observations from dictator games. Dictator offers are primarily explained by social distance, giving follows a simple inverse distance law. While student demographics play a minor role in explaining...

We build an overlapping generations model where an individual sees higher returns to adopting a behavior as many neighbors adopt the behavior. We show that overlap in the state of a parent and child's neighborhood can lead to correlation in parent-child behavior independent of any parent-child...

We study learning in a setting where agents receive independent noisy signals about the true value of a variable and then communicate in a network. They naïvely update beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of neighbors' opinions. We show that all opinions in a large society converge to...