Research in criminology has shown that the perceived risk of apprehension often differs substantially from the true level. To account for this insight, we extend the standard economic model of law enforcement (Becker, 1968) by considering two types of offenders, sophisticates and naïves. The...

An authority delegates a monitoring task to an agent. It can only observe the number of detected offenders, but neither the monitoring intensity chosen by the agent nor the resulting level of misbehavior. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the implementability of monitoring...

Research in criminology has shown that the perceived risk of apprehension often differs substantially from the true level. To account for this insight, we extend the standard economic model of law enforcement (Becker, 1968) by considering two types of offenders, sophisticates and naïves. The...

We study network formation in a strategic setting where every agent strives for short paths to the other agents. The main parameter of our model is the marginal rate of substitution between network benefits and linking costs. We provide boundaries of stable networks for increasing and decreasing...

On social media platforms, true and false information compete. Importantly, some messages travel much further than others, even if they concern the same topic. This fact is not reflected in models of social learning (or opinion formation) in networks. Our model fills this gap by allowing...

We study private communication in social networks prior to a majority vote on two alternative policies. Some (or all) agents receive a private imperfect signal about which policy is correct. They can, but need not, recommend a policy to their neighbors in the social network prior to the vote. We...

We investigate how the selection process of a leader affects team performance with respect to social learning. We use a lab experiment in which an incentivized guessing task is repeated in a star network with the leader at the center. Leader selection is either based on competence, on...