Community has a problematic relationship to economics. In general, contemporary political economics holds that groups have strongly negative effects on economic efficiency and growth, because groups bind individuals into situations where they can no longer realize their preferences, exit freely, and find effective representation for their interests. Communities are, at best, necessary evils whe...

We consider a model of influence with a set of non-strategic agents and two strategic agents. The non-strategic agents have initial opinions and are linked through a simply connected network. They update their opinions as in the DeGroot model. The two strategic agents have fixed and opposed opinions. They each form a link with a non-strategic agent in order to influence the average opinion that...

Ostrovsky (2008) [9] develops a theory of stability for a model of matching in exogenously given networks. For this model a generalization of pairwise stability, chain stability, can always be satisfied as long as agents’ preferences satisfy same side substitutability and cross side complementarity. Given this preference domain I analyze the interplay between properties of the network structure...

The Boltzmann–Gibbs distribution is currently widely used in economic modeling. One of the applications is integrated with the DSGE (Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium) model. However, a question that arises concerns whether the Boltzmann–Gibbs distribution can be directly applied, without considering the underlying social network structure more seriously, even though the social network str...

This paper discusses modern macroeconomic and financial models in the light of the current crisis. Theory has been revealed to be inadequate in its explanation of the origins and the nature of the crisis, as Jean-Claude Trichet the Governor of the European Central bank and his colleagues at other central banks have indicated. Basic macroeconomic models, however sophisticated have continued to b...

This paper models the dynamic process through which a large society may succeed in building up its ‘social capital’, i.e. a stable and dense pattern of interaction among its members. Agents play repeatedly an idiosyncratic Prisoner’s Dilemma with their neighbors. The social network specifies not only the playing partners but, crucially, also determines how relevant strategic information diffuse...

We present a dynamic model of network formation where nodes find other nodes with whom to form links in two ways: some are found uniformly at random, while others are found by searching locally through the current structure of the network (e.g., meeting friends of friends). This combination of meeting processes results in a spectrum of features exhibited by large social networks, including the ...

Suppose that individual payo¤s depend on the network connecting them. Consider the following simultaneous move game of network formation: players announce independently the links they wish to form, and links are formed only under mutual consent. We provide necessary and su¢ cient conditions on the network link marginal payo¤s such that the set of pairwise stable, pairwise-Nash and proper equili...

Pathogens in low water activity foods are an important emerging food safety concern due to notable survival and thermotolerance. Limited but growing data publicly available compare the thermotolerance of Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella spp., Enterococcus faecium NRRL B-2354 (a surrogate). The aims this study were determine assess bacterial thermal inactivation rates two pathogens a well-esta...