Jul 29, 2011 Filed in:
NewsNageeb Ali and I have been awarded a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation Economics Program, entitled “Enforcing Cooperation in Networked Societies.” Stay tuned for our first working paper soon (Update: now available), and lots of great projects to follow after that.
Abstract excerpt: The foundation of economic activity and growth is in the ability of individuals to trust and trade with each other over time. Throughout human history, much of economic activity occurs in realms where formal legal institutions are unwilling or unsuited to enforce cooperative behavior. A growing literature on informal enforcement suggests that the networked pattern of social relationships plays a key role in supporting cooperation: as information about past behavior diffuses through the network, an individual who deviates in a partnership is punished not only by her partner but also by those who come to learn about it. Our research program studies how communities enforce cooperation through their social networks. Tags: Social Networks, Cooperation, Community enforcement
Jan 25, 2013 Filed in:
Working papersWith S. Nageeb Ali
Abstract: Which social norms and networks maximize cooperation in bilateral relationships? We study a network of players in which each link is a repeated bilateral partnership with two-sided moral hazard. The obstacle to community enforcement is that each player observes the behavior of her partners in their partnerships with her, but not how they behave in other partnerships. We introduce a new metric for the rate at which information diffuses in a network, which we call viscosity, and show that it provides an operational measure for how conducive a network is to cooperation. We prove that clique networks have the lowest viscosity and that the optimal equilibrium of the clique generates more cooperation and higher average utility than any other equilibrium of any other network. This result offers a strategic foundation for the perspective that tightly knit groups foster the most cooperation. We apply this framework to analyze favor exchange arrangements, decentralized trade in networked markets, and social collateral.
Working paper 10/31/2012
Tags: Repeated games, Social Networks, Community enforcement, Cooperation, Contagion, Cliques
