Essays On Social And Economic Networks

My thesis consists of three chapters centred on the importance of social and economic networks in strategic decision-making processes from a theoretical and experimental perspective. The first chapter studies the “second order” effects of agents asymmetries, in terms of the ability to turn resources in winning probabilities or the value of the winning, in a network of conflicts. In the second chapter we introduce the Dirichlet Covariate Model (Campbell and Mosimann, 1987) for empirical analysis of compositional data. To illustrate the use of this method, we design and implement a novel experiment on an untested game played on weighted network to test equilibrium predictions. The third paper investigates the problem of dynamically assigning teams of workers to sets of tasks in a firm, when there is incomplete information about the workers’ productivities. The model presented in this chapter seeks to shed light on the trade-off between information acquisition and profit maximisation that firms might face in incomplete information environments.