The explosion in online social networks motivates an enquiry into their structure and their welfare effects. A central feature of these networks is information sharing: online social networks lower the cost of getting information from others. These lower costs affect the attractiveness of...

Societies are sometimes divided into groups that behave in different ways or have strongly opposing opinions. At other times, everyone seems to behave according to similar principles and opinions. It is likely that individual decisions on behavior or opinions are affected by social networks...

Although both betweenness and closeness centrality are claimed to be important for the effectiveness of someones network position, it has not been explicitly studied which networks emerge if actors follow incentives for these two positional advantages. We propose such a model and observe that...

There are clear benefits associated with a particular consumer choice for many current markets. For example, as we consider here, some products might carry environmental or `green' benefits. Some consumers might value these benefits while others do not. However, as evidenced by myriad failed...

This paper develops a formal model of exchange network stability that combines expected value theory (Friedkin 1995) with the economic literature on network dynamics. We identify stable networks up to size 8 for varying costs and investigate whether they are Pareto efficient and egalitarian....

The effect of an independent variable on a dependent variable is often evaluated with hypothesis testing. Sometimes, multiple studies are available that test the same hypothesis. In such studies, the dependent variable and the main predictors might differ, while they do measure the same...

If actors want to reach a particular goal, they are often better off forming collaborative relations and investing together rather than investing separately. We study the coordination and cooperation problems that might hinder successful collaboration in a dynamic network setting. We develop an...

We present a model of social interaction in which actors choose their partners and play the Chicken Game with them. In contrast to most previous models of the coevolution of games and networks, we assume that the actors can employ different actions against different partners. This allows us to...