Essays on social and economic networks
(2010)
Files
thesis.pdf
Open Access - Adobe PDF
- 656.52 KB
Details
- Authors
- Supervisors
- Abstract
- (en) This dissertation studies the outcome of social and economic interactions when agents have the possibility to establish bilateral or multilateral partnerships. Partnerships are critical to the scientific collaboration, R&D activities developed by firms, trade patterns, and to the dissemination of information about jobs, political opinions, new products and technologies. Chapter 1 identifies necessary and sufficient conditions on the primitives of the game so that farsighted agents -agents able to forecast how other agents would react to their choice of partners- form efficient networks. It shows that under those conditions, pairwise farsighted stability refines pairwise stability by eliminating the inefficient pairwise stable networks. In chapter 2, we provide an algorithm that characterizes the unique pairwise farsightedly stable set of networks when the value is allocated equally among the players of a component. It is shown that (i) if groupwise deviations are allowed then whether players are farsighted or myopic does not matter; (ii) if players are farsighted then whether players are allowed to deviate in pairs only or in groups does not matter. Chapter 3 analyzes the formation of risk-sharing networks among farsighted agents in rural areas of developing countries. We provide a theoretical explanation of the observation that risk-sharing takes place among agents having common characteristics (neighborhood, professional or religious affiliation, kinship, etc.). In chapter 4, we propose a new solution concept, the strong curb set, to analyze stability in non-cooperative games when groups of agents may coordinate their moves. We relate our concept with the standard notions of stability. It is shown that there is a class of dynamic learning processes such that at the limit, if memory is long enough, play settles down in a strong curb set.
- Affiliations
Citations
Grandjean, G. (2010). Essays on social and economic networks. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/148441