The law of the few refers to the following empirical phenomenon: in social groups a very small subset of individuals invests in collecting information while the rest of the group invests in forming connections with this select few. In many instances, there are no observable differences in...

We develop a model of R&D competition and collaboration in which individual firms carry out independent in-house research and also undertake joint research projects with other firms. We examine the impact of collaboration on in-house research and explore the circumstances under which a hybrid...

We consider a world in which individuals have private endowments and trade in markets, while their utility is sensitive to the consumption of their neighbors. Our interest is in understanding how social structure of comparisons, taken together with the familiar fundamentals of the economy �...

We study the problem of a firm M which wishes to inform a community of individuals about its product. Information travels within the community because of the social interactions between individuals. Our interest is in understanding how the firm can incorporate the network of social interactions...

This paper considers a game played among players who seek to extract payoffs from a group of individuals subject to local interaction effects. We are interested in the relation between the network of social interaction and equilibrium actions and payoffs. We start with an analysis of two...

This paper presents a survey of research on learning with a special focus on the structure of interaction between individual entities. The structure is formally modelled as a network: the nodes of the network are individuals while the arcs admit a variety of interpretations (ranging from...

The important role of friends, neighbors and colleagues in shaping individual choices has been brought out in a number of studies over the years. The presence of significant 'local' influence in shaping individual behavior suggests that firms, governments and developmental agencies should...

This paper examines the existence and magnitude of network effects in the matching of workteams. We study the formation of co-author relations among economists over a thirty year period. Our principal finding is that a collaboration emerges faster among two authors if they are closer in the...

This paper studies a connections model of network formation in which players are heterogeneous with respect to values as well as the cost of forming links. We start by showing that value heterogeneity is important in determining the level of connectedness of a network, while cost heterogeneity...