Smoking, like many health-related behaviors, has "social" aspects. The smoking habits of my neighbors are likely to shape my own smoking habits, due to what is known in economics as “peer effects.” These complementarities in behavior may result from emulation, joint consumption, conformism,...

We develop a model of friendship formation that sheds light on segregation patterns observed in social and economic networks. Individuals come in different types and have type-dependent benefits from friendships; we examine the properties of a steady-state equilibrium of a matching process of...

Biases in meeting opportunities have been recently shown to play a key role for the emergence of homophily in social networks (see Currarini, Jackson and Pin 2009). The aim of this paper is to provide a "simple" micro-foundation of these biases in a model where the size and type-composition of...

Many Social Interactions display either or both of the following well documented phenomena. People tend to interact with similar others (homophily). And they tend to treat others more favorably if they are perceived to share the same identity (in-group bias). While both phenomena involve some...