The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) college football ranking, in which the so-called national champion is determined, has been plagued by controversies the last few years. The difficulty arises because there is a need to make a complete ranking of teams even though each team has...

In this paper, we argue that an important function fulfilled by intermediaries is to facilitate trust by enabling social pressure towards the enforcement of informal agreements. To that end, we develop a new model that uses network theory to show that intermediaries who have exclusivity over a...

The NCAA college football ratings, in which the "so-called" national champion is determined, has been plagued by controversies the last few years. The difficulty arises because there is a need to make a complete ranking of teams even though each team has a different schedule of games with a...

The business model of companies such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, relies on mon- etizing the information on the interactions and in uences of their users. How valuable is such information, and is its use benecial or detrimental for consumer welfare? We study these questions in a model...

Consider a large market with asymmetric information, in which sellers have the option to "cheat" their buyers, and buyers decide whether to repurchase from different sellers. We model active trade relationships as links in a buyer-seller network and study repeated games in such networks....

This paper studies the phenomenon of early hiring in entry-level labor markets affected by social networks. We offer a model in which information is revealed over time. At first, workers have noisy information about their own ability. The early information is ‘soft’ and non-verifiable, and...