Related papers: An optimal test for strategic interaction in socia…
We discuss a simplified version of the testing problem considered by Pelican and Graham (2019): testing for interdependencies in preferences over links among N (possibly heterogeneous) agents in a network. We describe an exact test which…
Interactions between people are the basis on which the structure of our society arises as a complex system and, at the same time, are the starting point of any physical description of it. In the last few years, much theoretical research has…
The abundance of data about social relationships allows the human behavior to be analyzed as any other natural phenomenon. Here we focus on balance theory, stating that social actors tend to avoid establishing cycles with an odd number of…
How can one determine whether a community-level treatment, such as the introduction of a social program or trade shock, alters agents' incentives to form links in a network? This paper proposes analogues of a two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov…
Many socioeconomic phenomena, such as technology adoption, collaborative problem-solving, and content engagement, involve a collection of agents coordinating to take a common action, aligning their decisions to maximize their individual…
Professional networks -- the social networks among people in a given line of work -- can serve as a conduit for job prospects and other opportunities. Here we propose a model for the formation of such networks and the transfer of…
In various economic environments, people observe other people with whom they strategically interact. We can model such information-sharing relations as an information network, and the strategic interactions as a game on the network. When…
In this study, we consider a pairwise network formation model in which each dyad of agents strategically determines the link status between them. Our model allows the agents to have unobserved group heterogeneity in the propensity of link…
We study the emerging large-scale structures in networks subject to selective pressures that simultaneously drive towards higher modularity and robustness against random failures. We construct maximum-entropy null models that isolate the…
In economic settings such as learning, social behavior, and financial contagion, agents interact through interdependent networks. This paper examines how a decision maker (DM) can design an optimal intervention strategy under network…
Strategic network formation arises where agents receive benefit from connections to other agents, but also incur costs for forming links. We consider a new network formation game that incorporates an adversarial attack, as well as…
What networks can form and persist when agents are self-interested? Can such networks be efficient? A substantial theoretical literature predicts that the only networks that can form and persist must have very special shapes and that such…
In this paper, we introduce a conceptual framework that model human social networks as an undirected dot-product graph of independent individuals. Their relationships are only determined by a cost-benefit analysis, i.e. by maximizing an…
We study optimal contract design for large populations of heterogeneous agents whose actions generate network spillovers represented by an interaction function. In a linear-quadratic framework, we solve the finite-agent problem and its…
We study a network formation game where agents receive benefits by forming connections to other agents but also incur both direct and indirect costs from the formed connections. Specifically, once the agents have purchased their…
We investigate the benefits of heterogeneity in multi-agent explore-exploit decision making where the goal of the agents is to maximize cumulative group reward. To do so we study a class of distributed stochastic bandit problems in which…
In human societies, people's willingness to compete and strive for better social status as well as being envious of those perceived in some way superior lead to social structures that are intrinsically hierarchical. Here we propose an…
We study hypothesis testing over a heterogeneous population of strategic agents with private information. Any single test applied uniformly across the population yields statistical error that is sub-optimal relative to the performance of an…
How do inter-organizational networks emerge? Accounting for interdependence among ties while studying tie formation is one of the key challenges in this area of research. We address this challenge using an equilibrium framework where firms'…
We examine settings in which agents choose behaviors and care about their neighbors' behaviors, but have incomplete information about the network in which they are embedded. We develop a model in which agents use local knowledge of their…