The actions of different agents sometimes reinforce each other. Examples are network effects and the threshold models used by sociologists as well as Harvey Leibensteins's "bandwagon effects." We model such situations as a game with increasing differences, and show that tipping of equilibria,...

This paper studies bilateral insurance schemes across networks of individuals. While transfers are based on social norms, each individual must have the incentive to abide by those norms, and so we investigate the structure of stable insurance networks, in which self-enforcement constraints are...

This paper presents a model of local network effects in which agents connected by a social network each value the adoption of a product by a heterogeneous subset of other agents in their 'neighborhood', and have incomplete information about the structure and strength of adoption...

I discuss a fundamental and pervasive aspect of social networks that has a signfii cant impact on behavior: "homophily. "Homophily refers to the tendency of individuals to associate with others who have similar characteristics as themselves. This tendency has been observed across a variety of...

Most network games assume that the best response of a player is a linear function of the actions of her neighbors; clearly, this is a restrictive assumption. We developed a theory called sign-equivalent transformation (SET) underlying the mathematical structure behind a system of equations...

This paper applies for the first time power index analysis to the famous Krackhardt’s kite social network by imposing a weighted voting game on the given network structure. It compares the results of this analysis, derived by applying the Public Good Index and the Public Value, with the...

We investigate the role of conflicting interests in a boundedly rational model of belief dynamics. Individuals have different preferences about the action to take, are subject to persuasion bias and repeatedly communicate with their neighbors in a social network. They communicate strategically...

We study the incentives that agents have to invest in costly protection against cascading failures in networked systems. Applications include vaccination, computer security and airport security. Agents are connected through a network and can fail either intrinsically or as a result of the...

We study a DeGroot-like opinion dynamics model in which agents may oppose other agents. As an underlying motivation, in our setup, agents want to adjust their opinions to match those of the agents they follow (their 'in-group', friends, or those they trust) and, in addition, they want to adjust...

In the benchmark model of Bala and Goyal (2000) on network formation, the equilibrium network is asymmetric and unfair as agents have different payoffs. While they are prominent in reality, asymmetric networks do not emerge in the lab mainly because of fairness concerns. We extend this model...