This paper develops a simple model to examine the interaction between partner choice and individual behavior in games of coordination. An important ingredient of our approach is the way we model partner choice: We suppose that a player can establish ties with other players by unilaterally...

Individuals form teams to produce an output. The quality and quantity of a team's output depends on the ability and the effort level of its members. The ability of individuals as well as their work ethic is however imperfectly known. In such an environment, individuals wishing to form a new team...

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...

When there are competing technologies or products with unknown payoffs an important question is which technology will prevail and whether technologies with different payoffs can coexist in the long run. In this paper, we use a social learning model with local interactions to study this question....

Favoritism is the act of offering jobs, contracts and resources to members of one's social group in preference to outsiders. Favoritism is widely practiced and this motivates an exploration of its origins and economic consequences. Our main finding is that individuals have an interest to trade...

A recurring theme in the study of society is the concentration of influence and power that is driven through unequal membership of groups and associations. In some instances, these bodies constitute a small world while in others they are fragmented into distinct cliques. This paper presents a...

We develop a game-theoretic framework for the study of competition between firms who have budgets to "seed'' the initial adoption of their products by consumers located in a social network. The payoffs to the firms are the eventual number of adoptions of their product through a competitive...