This paper studies human capital investment in a spatial setting with interpersonal complementarities. A mixture of local and global social interactions affect the cost of acquiring education, and the return to human capital is determined endogenously in the market. We study how spatially segregated investment equilibria are affected by an increase in the relative importance of global vis-á-vis...

We study behavior and equilibrium selection in experimental network games. We vary two important factors: (a) actions are either strategic substitutes or strategic complements, and (b) subjects have either complete or incomplete information about the structure of a random network. Play conforms strongly to the theoretical predictions, providing an impressive behavioral confirmation of the Galeo...

A finitely repeated multi-player prisoner’s dilemma game has a unique, defective Nash equilibrium when played in a fixed group or on a fixed network. This paper shows that, in contrast, cooperation can be achieved in a subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium of a finitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma game when played over an endogenously formed network. The following game is finitely repeated: in each ...

We study how social networks change due to an exogenous intervention, such as an expansion in financial access, and we show how to estimate the effect of these network changes on individual outcomes (intervention spillovers). We use a unique panel dataset that contains detailed information on the network of informal financial transactions before and after a field experiment that randomized acce...

I present a model of observational learning with payoff interdependence. Agents, ordered in a sequence, receive private signals about an uncertain state of the world and sample previous actions. Unlike in standard models of observational learning, an agent’s payoff depends both on the state and on the actions of others. Agents want both to learn the state and to anticipate others’ play. As the ...

Heterogeneity in Nash networks with two-way flow can arise due to differences in the following four variables: (i) the value of information held by agents, (ii) the rate at which information decays or loses its value as it traverses the network, (iii) the probability with which a link transmits information, and (iv) the cost of forming a link. In this paper we show that heterogeneity plays an i...

The Role of Social Networks in Cultural Assimilation* We develop a model where, in the first stage, minority individuals have to decide whether or not they want to assimilate to the majority culture while, in the second stage, all individuals (both from the majority and the minority group) embedded in a network have to decide how much effort they exert in some activity (say education). We show ...

Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement (RAP) has been extensively studied for potential use as a recycled material in infrastructure construction. There is consensus that utilization of RAP provides environmental and economic benefits most projects. However, impacts to engineering performance are less known, owing the highly variable nature sources with different asphalt pavement mixtures milling processes...

We propose a model on strategic formation of communication networks with (i) link specificity: the more direct links somebody maintains, the less she can specify her attention per link, the lower her links’ value, while this negative externality was previously ignored in the communication context, and (ii) value transferability via indirect links for informational but not for social value from ...

A monopolist faces a partially uninformed population of consumers, interconnected through a directed social network. In the network, the monopolist offers rewards to informed consumers (influencers) conditional on informing uninformed consumers (influenced). Rewards are needed to bear a communication cost. We investigate the incentives for the monopolist to move to a denser network and the impa...