Essays on economic networks
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation theoretically analyzes how networks of relationships among decision-makers affect two kinds of economic processes: (i) investment in public goods; and (ii) repeated updating of beliefs or behaviors based on observing neighbors. The results connect these processes to the spectral properties of networks -- that is, eigenvalues and eigenvectors -- and use the connection to shed light on economic outcomes. The first essay, based on joint work with Matthew Elliott, focuses on games in which each player simultaneously exerts costly effort that provides different benefits to each other player. The goal is to find and describe effort profiles that are immune to coordinated coalitional deviations when such a game is played repeatedly. Formally, these effort profiles are the ones that can be sustained in a strong Nash equilibrium of the repeated game. We introduce a class of effort profiles that are called centrality-stable. These are characterized by a network centrality condition: agent A's contribution (defined as effort level times marginal cost) is equal to a weighted sum of the contributions of those who help A; the weight on B's contribution measures the marginal benefit B's effort provides to A. Under certain assumptions (mainly concavity of utility functions), centrality-stable profiles exist, are Pareto-efficient, and any such profile is sustainable in a coalitionally robust equilibrium of the repeated game. Centrality-stable profiles also have an alternative definition: they are those at which all agents are first-order indifferent to scaling all efforts by a factor near
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2011 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Golub, Benjamin |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Business |
| Primary advisor | Jackson, Matthew O |
| Primary advisor | Skrzypacz, Andrzej, 1973- |
| Thesis advisor | Jackson, Matthew O |
| Thesis advisor | Skrzypacz, Andrzej, 1973- |
| Thesis advisor | Wilson, Robert, 1937- |
| Advisor | Wilson, Robert, 1937- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Benjamin Golub. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Business. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2011 |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/bx073xv3751 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2011 by Benjamin Golub
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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