Abstract Desiring conformity but lacking common labels with which to identify the different options, a population employs reliable social connections to identify paths through which decisions can disseminate. A leader serves the population by coordinating adoption and therefore increasing...

We consider a connection networks model. Every agent has a demand in the form of pairs of locations she wants connected, and a willingness to pay for connectivity. A planner aims at implementing a welfare maximizing network and allocating the resulting cost, but information is asymmetric: agents...

We consider a generalization of the Minimum Cost Spanning Tree (MCST) model dubbed the Minimum Cost Connection Network (MCCN) model, where network users have connection demands in the form of a pair of target nodes they want connected directly, or indirectly. Given a network which satisfies all...

This paper examines network formation among a connected population with a preference for conformity and leadership. Agents build stable personal relationships to achieve coordinated actions. The network serves as a repository of collective experiences so that cooperation can emerge from simple,...

We study games played between groups of players, where a given group decides which strategy it will play through a vote by its members. When groups consist of two voting players, our games can also be interpreted as network-formation games. In experiments on Stag Hunt games, we find a stark...

Since the seminal contribution of Jackson & Wolinsky 1996 [A Strategic Model of Social and Economic Networks, JET 71, 44-74] it has been widely acknowledged that the formation of social networks exhibits a general conflict between individual strategic behavior and collective outcome. What has...

This paper studies the properties of convexity (concavity) and strategic complements (substitutes) in network formation and the implications for the structure of pairwise stable networks. First, different definitions of convexity (concavity) in own links from the literature are put into the...

This paper deals with the role of reciprocation in the formation of individuals' social networks, that is to what extent initiating a relation brings about its reciprocation. Following the activity of a panel of bloggers over more than a year, we seek to establish whether bloggers are mainly...

We provide existence results in a game with local spillovers where the payoff function satisfies both convexity and the strategic substitutes property. We show that there always exists a stable pairwise network in this game, and provide a condition which ensures the existence of pairwise...