The result that firms competing in a Cournot oligopoly with pairwise collaboration form a complete network under zero or negligible link formation costs provided by Goyal and Joshi (2003) no longer hold in multi-market oligopolies. Link formation in one market affects a firm’s profitability...

Social networks, be it on the internet or in real life, facilitate information flows. We model this by giving agents incentives to link with others and receive information through those links. We consider networks where agents have an incentive to confirm the information they receive from...

The result that firms competing in a Cournot oligopoly with pairwise collaboration form a complete network under zero or negligible link formation costs provided by Goyal and Joshi (2003) no longer hold in multi-market oligopolies. Link formation in one market affects a firm’s profitability...

We consider an oligopoly setting in which firms form pairwise collaborative links in R&D with other firms. Each collaboration generates a value that depends on the identity of the firms that collaborate. First, we provide properties satisfied by pairwise equilibrium networks and efficient...

Previous studies have demonstrated that a multitude of options can lead to choice overload, reducing decision quality. Through controlled experiments, we examine sequential choice architectures that enable the choice set to remain large while potentially reducing the effect of choice overload. A...

We study how group membership affects behavior both when group members can and cannot interact with each other. Our goal is to isolate the contrasting forces that spring from group membership: a free-riding incentive leading to reduced effort and a sense of social responsibility that increases...

This paper investigates how lineages, the commonly found organizations in rural villages of China, affect people’s intra- and cross-lineage cooperative behavior. We use data from the Chinese Household Income Project Survey 2002, which exclusively contains information about the lineage...

Outbreaks of infectious diseases bring behavior and policy responses into sharp focus since societies face acute constraints and uncertainties. This paper compares two infectious disease outbreaks: the Covid-19 pandemic and the 1665 London plague outbreak described by Daniel Defoe in A Journal...

This paper argues that the availability of arable land in antiquity created gender norms that continue to affect current gender inequality. We show that countries with greater ancestral arable land have lower levels of gender inequality, better female reproductive health outcomes, and greater...

Individuals bring effort to a group to achieve a common objective. Group membership introduces a free riding incentive, reducing effort, as well as a social responsibility incentive, increasing effort. This paper shows that the free riding effect is stronger. Individuals significantly reduce...