In this paper we test for risk pooling within and among social networks to see if the extent of informal insurance available to individuals in rural Ghana varies with their social visibility. We identify a distinct sub-population of socially invisible individuals who tend to be younger, poorer,...

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...

Social networks are now deemed a critical element of economic activity. In the study of social networks and new venture creation, immigrant entrepreneurs have received focused attention as exemplary cases illustrating the benefits of social networks. The seemingly tightly woven networks among...

This paper reports on an analysis of original data from a cross-national survey in 17 countries of couples and their social relationships. The survey focused on cohabiting couples, who have the Internet at home. Each member of each couple was asked how they met their partners, what dating...

We study evolutionary learning processes through social networks. We show that network heterogeneity, in particular scale-freeness, enhances social learning by studying a model in which an agent set on a network imitates the strategy only from the neighborhood. Further, in order to determine...

A social alliance is a concept that people struggle to provide for themselves, but is rarely fully understood. In recent years, there has been a growing, strongly accruing, realization that people are abreast of the knowledge/situation/information that is evolving continuously. More...

This article studies the identity-based incentives to produce individual efforts on social networks. We integrate self-esteem in individual utilities and we assume that this factor internalizes the assessments of neighbors on own production level. We examine the impact of the structure of social...

We describe a model of networks that is both useful as a descriptive model for how interpersonal networks form, and as a tool for agent-based simulations that require artificially generated networks. It uses a latent space technique, but simplifies the standard computation using a principal...