This article discusses two applications of social network theory to employment and social policies. Job contact networks help workers find jobs and risk-sharing networks help villagers in developing countries insure against illness and idiosyncratic shocks. In both applications, recent advances...

This paper analyzes the formation of partnerships in social networks. Agents randomly request favors and turn to their neighbors to form a partnership. If favors are costly, agents have an incentive to delay the formation of the partnership. In that case, for any initial social network, the...

This chapter surveys recent models of coalition and network formation in a unified framework. Comparisons are drawn among various procedures of network and coalition formation, involving simultaneous and sequential moves. The survey also covers models of group and network formation by farsighted...

We analyze the design of a mechanism to extract a ranking of individuals according to a unidimensional characteristic, such as ability or need. Individuals, connected on a social network, only have local information about the ranking. We show that a planner can construct an ex post incentive...

This paper studies a game of attack and interception in a network where a single attacker chooses a target and a path, and each node chooses a level of protection. We show that the Nash equilibrium of the game exists and is unique. We characterize equilibrium attack paths and attack...