We study a simple dynamic model of social learning with local informational externalities. There is a large population of agents, who repeatedly have to choose one, out of two, reversible actions, each of which is optimal in one, out of two, unknown states of the world. Each agent chooses rationally, on the basis of private information (s)he receives by a symmetric binary signal on the state, a...

We consider a co-evolutionary model of social coordination and network formation where agents may decide on an action in a 2 × 2 coordination game and on whom to establish costly links to. We find that a payoff dominant convention is selected for a wider parameter range when agents may only support a limited number of links as compared to a scenario where agents are not constrained in their lin...

Swarming, a collective motion of many thousands of cells, produces colonies that rapidly spread over surfaces. In this paper, we introduce a cell-based model to study how interactions between neighboring cells facilitate swarming. We chose to study Myxococcus xanthus, a species of myxobacteria, because it swarms rapidly and has well-defined cell-cell interactions mediated by type IV pili and by...

We state conditions for existence and uniqueness of equilibria in dynamic microeconomic models with an infinity of locally and globally interacting agents. Agents face repeated discrete choice problems. Their utility depends on the actions of some designated neighbors and the average choice throughout the whole population. We show that the dynamics on the level of aggregate behavior can be desc...

Tax Evasion and Social Interactions The paper extends the standard tax evasion model by allowing for social interactions. In Manski’s (1993) nomenclature, our model takes into account social conformity effects (i.e., endogenous interactions), fairness effects (i.e., exogenous interactions) and sorting effects (i.e., correlated effects). Our model is tested using experimental data. Participants ...

Fashion plays such a crucial rule in the evolution of culture and society that it is regarded as a second nature to the human being. Also, its impact on economy is quite nontrivial. On what is fashionable, interestingly, there are two viewpoints that are both extremely widespread but almost opposite: conformists think that what is popular is fashionable, while rebels believe that being differen...

Debt-induced crises, including the subprime, are usually attributed exclusively to supply-side factors. We examine the role of social influences on debt culture, emanating from perceived average income of peers. Utilizing unique information from a household survey representative of the Dutch population, that circumvents the issue of defining the social circle, we consider collateralized, consum...

Evolution of cooperation is a fundamental question of socio-biology. Intrinsic factors like kinship play an important role in cooperation among selfish individuals. External factors like uncertainty and the structure of the social interaction network also contribute significantly to the evolution of cooperation. Here I use agent-based simulations to generate artificial social networks. I show t...