In contexts ranging from public goods provision to information collection, a player's well-being depends on his or her own action as well as on the actions taken by his or her neighbours. We provide a framework to analyse such strategic interactions when neighbourhood structure, modelled in terms of an underlying network of connections, affects payoffs. In our framework, individuals are partially informed about the structure of the social network. The introduction of incomplete information allows us to provide general results characterizing how the network structure, an individual's position within the network, the nature of games (strategic substitutes vs. complements and positive vs. negative externalities) and the level of information shape individual behaviour and payoffs. Copyright © 2009 The Review of Economic Studies Limited.
We analyze games on social networks where agents select one of two actions (whether or not to adopt a new technology, withdraw money from the bank, become politically active, etc.). Agents' payoffs from each of the two actions depend on how many neighbors she has, the distribution of actions among her neighbors, and a possibly idiosyncratic cost for each of the actions. We analyze the diffusion of behavior when in each period agents choose a best response to last period's behavior. We characterize how the equilibrium points of such a process and their stability depend on the network architecture, the distribution of costs, and the payoff structure. We also illustrate how the dynamics of behavior depends on the number of neighbors that agents have. Our results have implications and applications to marketing, epidemiology, financial contagions, and technology adoption.JEL classification: C45, C70, C73, D85, L15. * We are grateful for financial support from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and the Guggenheim Foundation. We thank Tanya Rosenblat for a discussion of the paper and Brian Rogers for comments.
Snowberg gratefully acknowledges the support of NSF grants SES-1156154 and SMA-1329195. Yariv gratefully acknowledges the support of NSF grant SES-0963583 and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant 1158. We thank Marco Castillo, Yoram Halevy, Muriel Niederle, and Lise Vesterlund for comments and suggestions, as well as seminar audiences at Caltech, SITE, and UBC. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
There is abundant research identifying external characteristics (race, gender, adolescent height) that affect labor market outcomes; for recent contributions, see Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) and Persico, Postlewaite and Silverman (2004). In this paper, we focus on the effects of surname initials on professional outcomes in the academic labor market for economists.We begin our analysis with data on faculty in all top 35 U.S. economics departments. Faculty with earlier surname initials are significantly more likely to receive tenure at top ten economics departments, are significantly more likely to become fellows of the Econometric Society, and, to a lesser extent, are more likely to receive the Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize. These statistically significant differences remain the same even after we control for country of origin, ethnicity, religion or departmental fixed effects. All these effects gradually fade as we increase the sample to include our entire set of top 35 departments.We suspect the "alphabetical discrimination" reported in this paper is linked to the norm in the economics profession prescribing alphabetical ordering of credits on coauthored publications. As a test, we replicate our analysis for faculty in the top 35 U.S. psychology departments, for which coauthorships are not normatively ordered alphabetically. We find no relationship between alphabetical placement and tenure status in psychology.We then discuss the extent to which the effects of alphabetical placement are internalized by potential authors in their choices of the number of coauthors as
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