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on Microeconomics |
| By: | Dirk Bergemann; Andrew Koh; Stephen Morris |
| Abstract: | We develop a framework for mechanism design with AI agents whose alignment (preferences) and capabilities (feasible actions and information) are unknown. We want such agents to act on our behalf so mechanisms must incentivize both honesty and obedience. A one-sided imitation structure---capabilities can be concealed but not counterfeited---yields a revelation principle, a characterization of implementable policies via nested cyclical monotonicity, and conditions under which eliciting higher-order beliefs can discipline multiple agents. We apply our framework to stylized examples of (i) sandbagging in which a more capable agent pretends to be less capable; (ii) an alignment--interpretability trade-off, where the two are substitutes in the instrument but complements in value; (iii) discipline via peer scoring; (iv) coupling rewards to induce competition among multiple agents; and (v) scalable oversight and reward shaping. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.01595 |
| By: | Mira Frick; Ryota Iijima; Daisuke Oyama |
| Abstract: | We study the strategic impact of ambiguity through the channel of higher-order beliefs. We show that even small amounts of prior ambiguity about game payoffs can generate arbitrarily large amounts of higher-order ambiguity. This gives rise to a novel form of contagion: vanishingly small payoff ambiguity can select ``secure'' actions (e.g., non-participation) as the unique equilibrium outcome even when those actions are almost dominated. We highlight two main implications. First, classical robustness results under probabilistic uncertainty break down under ambiguity when players can deviate to secure actions. Second, if a designer can introduce small amounts of payoff ambiguity into a game, this can serve as a powerful tool for unique implementation. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.24560 |
| By: | Georgy Lukyanov |
| Abstract: | Actions determine not only payoffs but what can be learned. I study communication across successive decision makers when hidden effort governs public evidence and a sender motivates her successor while underweighting effort cost. Common sender rankings can force every message into a Bayes-unavoidable nonidentifying region. If experimentation is costly, strong motivation can make persuasive encouragement incredible and produce inactivity after a confounded failure. If maximal effort is technologically saturated, the same bias can produce universal overexertion after a bad pooled history, which is equally uninformative. At such nodes collapse is monotone: once strong motivation eliminates the identifying action, strengthening it cannot restore information. Moderate motivation instead preserves causal distinctions. In a threshold application, stronger motivation raises measured success yet lowers welfare because society fails to learn that less effort would suffice. A Kullback--Leibler decomposition shows that certification directly adds no information after entry into a fixed recursively nonidentifying region. Whether it prevents entry depends on attribution--selection alignment: do certificate-induced posteriors preserve the identifying action? The corrective action payment changes sign across technologies---subsidize effort when agents do too little, but subsidize restraint when maximal effort is saturated. Motivation selects the costly action, not the informative one. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.03719 |
| By: | Gan, Tan; Wu, Nicholas |
| Abstract: | An informed seller designs a dynamic mechanism to sell an experience good. The seller has private information about product match, which affects the buyer’s private consumption experience. The belief gap between both parties coupled with the buyer’s learning yields mechanisms providing the skeptical buyer with limited access to the product and an option to upgrade if the buyer is swayed by a good experience. Depending on the seller’s screening technology, this takes the form of free/discounted trials or dynamic tiered pricing, which are prevalent in digital markets. Unlike static environments, having consumer data can reduce sellers’ revenue in equilibrium. |
| Keywords: | dynamic mechanism design;informed principal;signaling;trial mechanisms |
| JEL: | D82 D83 |
| Date: | 2026–08–13 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:130260 |
| By: | Yutong Zhang; Yangfan Zhou |
| Abstract: | We study robust mechanisms when the designer possesses a Bayesian belief over some components of agents' private information but faces ambiguity over others. The designer evaluates mechanisms by their worst-case performance over all joint distributions consistent with her belief over the Bayesian components. The framework encompasses settings such as multidimensional delegation in which a principal knows the distribution of the state but not the agent's preferences (e.g., his tradeoffs across dimensions), screening in which a seller only has misspecified estimates of buyer preferences, and auction and voting design when agents' beliefs about each other are ambiguous to the designer. We provide conditions under which a \emph{knowledge-based} mechanism---one that conditions only on the Bayesian components but not the ambiguous ones---is robustly optimal. Our results unify earlier work across distinct economic environments and uncover new applications. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.03439 |
| By: | Zhonghong Kuang; Jingfeng Lu |
| Abstract: | Two contestants with possibly different marginal costs compete across identical battlefields governed by a Tullock technology with discriminatory power at most one. A symmetric schedule divides a fixed prize according to the number of victories. Allowing for inactivity, unequal efforts across battlefields, and arbitrary mixed strategies, we prove the existence and uniformity of equilibrium. Equilibrium may be pure, semi-pure (one contestant mixes), or two-sided mixed; in a two-sided mixed equilibrium, each contestant uses at most countably many positive effort levels. Multiple equilibria with different structures can coexist while generating the same expected effort, prize share, cost, and payoff. For every admissible schedule and cost ratio, equilibrium is unique with six or fewer battlefields, whereas seven first permits multiplicity or two-sided mixing. We also characterize all equilibria under majority rule. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.02031 |
| By: | Igal Milchtaich |
| Abstract: | The paper explores a theoretical freemium model for the sale of information, drawing on mathematical tools used in the study of repeated zero-sum games and Bayesian persuasion. Unlike standard Bayesian persuasion models, the information seller (IS) is indifferent to the actions taken by the information buyer (IB) and is concerned solely with maximizing the revenue from selling information. Offering some information for free may increase the IB's willingness to pay for additional information. The information that the IB seeks is about the state of the world. Initially, the IB only knows the prior distribution over possible states. The IS supplies both free and paid information through signals whose state-dependent distributions determine the IB's posterior via Bayes' rule. The IB's utility is a function of the posterior. An optimal free signal is one that maximizes the IS's expected revenue from the subsequent paid signal. That revenue is equal to the IB's expected utility gain when moving from the posterior induced by the free signal to that induced by the paid signal. The paper characterizes the optimal free and paid signals and derives a formula for the maximal revenue in terms of the IB's utility function. It shows that a revenue gain for the IS from the provision of free information is accompanied by a loss to the IB. Whether free information can increase the IS's revenue depends on the form of the IB's utility function. In the two-state case, that dependence is fully characterized. In the general case, only necessary conditions are obtained. In particular, if the IB's utility function is convex, the IS can never profit from providing free information. This occurs, in particular, when the IB uses the information to solve a decision problem. By contrast, when the IB is engaged in a strategic interaction with a third party, the IS may benefit from providing free information. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.01468 |
| By: | Jawwad Noor; Yuzhao Yang |
| Abstract: | We represent a non-Bayesian agent as one who does not completely trust the information they receive. The behavioral expression of complete trust lies in a homogeneity property of Bayesian updating: posterior beliefs do not change if a signal is made arbitrarily rare by scaling down its likelihood vector. We show that simply dropping this property and retaining all other Bayesian behavioral properties yields a unique representation where the agent is still Bayesian but has subjective uncertainty over the information structure generating the signal. The representation result is proved using the Fundamental Theorem of Projective Geometry. We analyze how various updating biases may be rationalized by a lack of trust. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.04622 |
| By: | Seiya Hirano |
| Abstract: | Two-sided markets exhibiting network effects often face coordination problems, which may lead to an inefficient outcome where a lower-quality platform wins the market. Some users make collective decisions as a group, potentially affecting the choices of others. This paper analyzes the impact of group users on two-sided platform competition. We develop a model with two platforms: one with a quality advantage (the higher-quality platform) and the other with a network advantage due to its focality (the lowerquality platform), meaning that users expect others to join it when multiple equilibria exist. There are two types of users: individual users and group users. An individual user makes decisions independently, whereas group users make collective choices that can affect others’ decisions. Our main findings are as follows: First, the group affects individual users’ choices if its size is sufficiently large, meaning it is pivotal. However, even if the group is pivotal, it may join the lower-quality platform unless it is large enough. The group joins the higher-quality platform only when it is both pivotal and sufficiently large. Second, we examine how the group size affects surplus distribution. Increasing group size improves market efficiency but exacerbates the disparity in the surplus between the group users and individual users. Our results highlight the dual role of group users in platform competition: while they can enhance efficiency by steering the market toward the higher-quality platform, they may also contribute to imbalances in surplus distribution. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dpr:wpaper:1320 |
| By: | Zihao Li; Minghao Pan |
| Abstract: | Which social norms are self-correcting under rational learning? We show that conduct sustained by false beliefs cannot persist if a single departure from prevailing behavior generates evidence against those beliefs. We study the overlapping-generations learning model of Fudenberg and Levine (1993), in which finitely lived Bayesian agents are repeatedly and randomly matched with agents in other player roles, observe only their own matches, and learn from experience. In simple extensive-form games with nodewise-independent, nondegenerate priors, as agents live increasingly long lives and become sufficiently patient, every limiting game outcome is path-equivalent to a subgame-confirmed equilibrium. This establishes the converse of Fudenberg and Levine (2006). The mechanism is endogenous experimentation: uncertainty about the consequences of a potentially profitable departure gives patient agents an incentive to test it, generating the observations that correct beliefs and discipline continuation play. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.05380 |
| By: | Bin Liu; Jingfeng Lu |
| Abstract: | We develop a unified approach to optimal grading in an all-pay contest in which a designer assigns a fixed vector of heterogeneous prizes to maximize expected total effort. The approach covers two information regimes and identifies a common principle: iron locally misordered incentive returns and assign prizes assortatively across the resulting grades. Under rank-only grading, assignments depend only on ordinal ranks. Ironing cumulative rank coefficients---via the least concave majorant or the pool-adjacent-violators algorithm---determines which adjacent ranks are pooled and which prizes are randomized within each grade. Under performance-contingent grading, assignments may depend on numerical effort. The optimum irons virtual ability, forms endogenous type grades, and assigns prize blocks assortatively across grades. A failing grade below a minimum passing effort and a collection of effort brackets implement the direct optimum while preserving full prize assignment. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.23407 |
| By: | Yu Awaya; Vijay Krishna; Eduard Osipov |
| Abstract: | We study auctions of k identical objects to n bidders, each of whom wants at most one. The objects have a common but unknown value and the bidders receive private signals about this value. The discriminatory price auction and the uniform-price auction are compared in terms of how informative the resulting auction prices (not bids) are in conveying the true value to an outside observer/investor. Since both auctions have symmetric, monotone equilibria, the problem reduces to comparing the informativeness of the highest order statistic of a sample to the (k+1)st highest. We find sufficient conditions under which the highest order statistic is superior---in the sense of Lehmann---in this regard. The sufficient conditions involve the informativeness of high versus low signals and the ratio k/n of objects to bidders. These conditions are also qualitatively necessary. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.04332 |
| By: | Shinya Sugiura |
| Abstract: | We characterize the communication networks that ensure consensus in rational social learning under the sure-thing principle. A network ensures consensus if and only if it is pseudo-reciprocal, a property under which reciprocity may fail between individuals but holds at a coarser group level. Prior work has assumed message exchange to be bidirectional, yet such pairwise reciprocity proves largely dispensable. We show that a single bidirectional link can suffice, however large the population. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.22234 |
| By: | Jake Zhang |
| Abstract: | We study a binary choice problem in which an agent chooses between two actions whose payoff depends on a continuous state. The agent chooses how much effort to invest in learning about the state. Equivalently, we can think of the state as the strength of a stimulus, with the agent exerting costly effort to be more responsive to it. Taking as given the Fisher information cost introduced by Hebert and Woodford (2021), we analyze the optimal state-dependent choice rule using a variational approach. The main result is that agents' optimal response is an S-shaped function of the state under mild conditions. This prediction is aligned with the widely documented psychometric curve response profile observed in the experimental literature in psychology and economics. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.05444 |
| By: | Mark Whitmeyer |
| Abstract: | I argue that there is a sense in which universal equilibrium (defined loosely) existence in games is incompatible with eschewing strictly dominated strategies and a sense in which it isn't. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.06327 |
| By: | Bianca Sanesi; Federico Vaccari |
| Abstract: | We study how competition among biased news sources affects information and welfare when sources can misrepresent facts at a cost. Monopolistic and competitive market structures admit many equilibria. We develop a common belief-based selection criterion that applies to both and makes welfare comparisons possible. Under the refined outcomes, adding an oppositely biased source improves the receiver's welfare when that source faces sufficiently high misreporting costs. Competition disciplines the incumbent while introducing a few distortions of its own. Better information need not increase total welfare, and distorted advice from a monopolist can raise total welfare. Competition may improve decision-making without being socially beneficial. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.24129 |
| By: | Yonggyun Kim; Francisco Poggi |
| Abstract: | Firms racing to innovate often make interim breakthroughs that speed up, but are not necessary for, the final innovation. When such a breakthrough is privately acquired, a firm can disclose it by filing a patent, or conceal it. This paper studies how this trade off is shaped by the race structure and the intellectual property system. We develop a dynamic model where firms allocate resources between developing with an existing technology and researching a faster one. We show that firms strategically conceal their breakthroughs when the prize for winning is large and the prior-use defense is strong, impeding knowledge spillovers and slowing the pace of innovation. |
| Keywords: | Interim Technology, Patents, License, Prior-use Defense, Direction of In novation |
| JEL: | C73 D21 O30 |
| Date: | 2025–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2025_648v2 |
| By: | Henrik Petri; Kai Wang |
| Abstract: | We study how advertised products (e.g., Top Picks, Recommended, Featured) affect consumer choice on digital platforms and retail interfaces by extending the Luce (1959) (or multinomial logit) model. A consumer either focuses on the advertised items or considers the full menu, then chooses among the considered alternatives according to the Luce/logit rule. We characterize this model and show that its underlying primitives are uniquely identified from choice data. We also study a managerially important advertisement-design problem, in which a platform or retailer chooses the advertised subset to maximize expected profit, and we derive implementable design rules. We then introduce a richer framework in which advertising can influence both attention and preference. For this more general model, we provide a characterization and show how choice data can be used to separate the attention effect from the preference effect. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.03504 |
| By: | Jean-Marie Baland (Development Finance and Public Policies, University of Namur); Giorgio Ferroni (Development Finance and Public Policies, University of Namur) |
| Abstract: | Dewatripont and Tirole (2024) show that firms’ moral conduct in the market is independent of competitive pressure. We argue that such a result hinges on consumers’ ability to identify each producer’s moral conduct—an assumption that is, in general, unlikely to hold. Specifically, the number of firms and demand elasticity matter if consumers have only a general perception of morality in the market. In such a setting, morality becomes a public good: firms bear the full cost of their moral behaviour while capturing only a fraction of the benefits from increased consumer willingness to pay. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nam:defipp:2606 |
| By: | Darrell Duffie; Chaojun Wang |
| Abstract: | With complete-information bilateral bargaining in network settings, holdup is eliminated when contracts across the network are agreed atomically (all or none) via a smart contract. Applications include over-the-counter asset trading, third-party-financed purchase agreements, and land assembly. Under a novel extensive-form bargaining protocol, a firm can give a “greenlight” to the terms of a contract proposed to that firm, and the protocol automatically converts those terms into a binding contract if the terms proposed to all other firms are likewise given greenlights. In any Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium with Markov strategies, firms immediately agree on socially efficient contracts. |
| JEL: | C70 D47 D60 D70 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35678 |
| By: | Takaaki Abe |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how outside options are incorporated into payoff distributions in games with coalition structures. We introduce and characterize the alpha-value, which "fully" incorporates outside options, and provide a new characterization of the Aumann-Dreze value as an allocation rule that does not incorporate outside options. We show that the chi-value (Casajus, 2009) is a component-wise convex combination of these two values and thus incorporates outside options in a discounted form. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.00799 |
| By: | Federico Gatta; Manuel Naviglio; Francesco Tarantelli |
| Abstract: | Reputation is a fundamental mechanism through which markets sustain trust when service quality cannot be perfectly assessed ex ante, constituting a form of intertemporal economic capital by attracting future demand. Its effectiveness as a disciplinary mechanism depends not only on past interactions but also on the persistence of the identity to which reputation is attached. When identities can be abandoned and recreated cheaply, reputational capital may itself become an object of opportunistic exploitation. This paper develops a dynamic economic framework to study when reputation is sufficient to discipline autonomous agents. We model reputation as capital attracting future economic activity. At each point, an agent chooses between operating honestly, investing in quality to preserve future gains, or executing a one-shot deviation to extract its reputation's value and restart from a penalized identity. Our analysis relates the temptation to opportunistic behavior to identity-reset costs, reputation persistence, demand sensitivity, and enforcement design, deriving comparative statics on optimal quality provision. Autonomous AI-agent operating on the blockchain are a relevant application: infrastructures such as ERC-8004, ERC-8183, and x402 combine reputation, identity, and payments in permissionless markets. Nonetheless, our framework applies to any environment where reputation generates future business and identities are replaceable. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.02992 |
| By: | Isaiah Andrews |
| Abstract: | Representation theorems in decision theory establish that behavior satisfies certain axioms if and only if it can be rationalized by a well-defined objective. I argue that this ``if and only if'' structure provides a potentially useful foundation for label-free evaluation and regularization of LLMs and other AI systems. Axiom compliance can be checked from the model's own responses to synthetic choice problems, with no external labels or human feedback, and the penalties are readily computable. Because the axioms are necessary and sufficient, the resulting checks exhaust the implications of the relevant rationality standard for the elicited data: a model that passes cannot be rejected on rationality grounds by any further test of the same data. I discuss three instantiations: probabilistic coherence via a theorem of de Finetti, preference rationality via Afriat's theorem, and subjective expected utility via a theorem of Echenique and Saito (2015), each yielding a continuous penalty that is zero whenever behavior can be rationalized. Since coherence does not restrict which objective rationalizes behavior, these penalties complement rather than replace other evaluation and training signals. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.05015 |
| By: | Toshiya Yoshimura |
| Abstract: | We study coalitional manipulation of interval-valued median correspondences on the single-peaked domain. Under the pessimistic extension, group strategy-proofness rules out any genuinely set-valued choice. Under the optimistic and best--worst extensions, by contrast, group strategy-proofness characterizes target set correspondences. Moreover, coalitions of at most two voters suffice for both the impossibility and characterization results. Thus, coalitional robustness sharply restricts, but need not eliminate, set-valued flexibility. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.18739 |
| By: | Paramahansa Pramanik |
| Abstract: | We develop a continuous-time stochastic choice theory with endogenous preference evolution. Unlike dynamic random utility, observed behavior affects future preferences through the conditional distribution of latent preference states, generating endogenous distributional feedback. We show that this feedback has observable behavioral implications and characterize stochastic choice by a behavioral representation consisting of contemporaneous choice and continuation behavior. This representation is identified from stochastic choice, yields a rigidity result linking structural preference dynamics to observable behavior, and characterizes exactly when distribution dependent utility is behaviorally reducible to dynamic random utility. We further prove a behavioral impossibility theorem: stochastic choice arrays exhibiting behavioral distributional feedback admit no dynamic random utility representation. On the probabilistic side, we establish existence and weak uniqueness for the underlying conditional McKean-Vlasov system with conditional law feedback. The structure unifies endogenous information, latent preference dynamics, behavioral identification, and stochastic choice within a single continuous-time model. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.06152 |
| By: | Matthew O. Jackson; Suraj Malladi; David McAdams |
| Abstract: | We examine how agents learn when information from original sources only reaches them after noisy relay. A receiver learns if and only if they have access to sufficiently many chains of noisy relay and they perfectly understand the noise process. However, even slight uncertainty over message mutation rates makes learning from long chains impossible, no matter how many independent sources are accessed. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.18283 |
| By: | Maysam Rabbani; Ram Sewak Dubey |
| Abstract: | Hybrid platforms disadvantage third-party sellers through the platform fee and self-preferencing, and regulators have worried that constraining either instrument may intensify the other. We model a platform that chooses both instruments and find the opposite: single-instrument regulation is effective because the instruments are strategic complements, and regulating either instrument curbs the other. We also find that the two instruments achieve what monopolization achieves, higher prices and reduced consumer welfare, while passing every conventional antitrust test. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.02800 |
| By: | Joshua S. Gans |
| Abstract: | Firms have begun granting passive equity stakes to the government that regulates them. The received reading is “skin in the game:” ownership moves profits onto the treasury's balance sheet, so policy softens. We show that once the price of the stake and the firm's policy exposure are determined in equilibrium, the owners' consent reveals nothing about whether they benefit. Sellers capitalise the induced policy improvement into the price, so an anticipated purchase can only occur at a discount; a government with bargaining power pays zero for a sufficiently exposed firm; and a government that can first raise exposure manufactures precisely enough of it to drive the negotiated price to its legal floor. Equity becomes tribute. Prohibition is nonetheless dominated: at fixed exposure, a passive stake corrects the political underweighting of shareholders. Welfare is maximised by priced permission—an ownership cap at the fixed-exposure optimum and a per-unit price floor equal to baseline no-stake value. The floor, unlike the cap, requires no knowledge of the government's political weights. |
| JEL: | D72 G38 L32 L51 P18 |
| Date: | 2026–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35518 |
| By: | Cabau, Noemie; Tenev, Anastas |
| Abstract: | We consider a model of network formation in which agents benefit from intermediation insofar as they are the only bridge between agents who would otherwise be unconnected. Their payoffs depend proportionally on their frequency as intermediaries. We analyze two types of payoffs: global, based on the intermediation across the whole network; and local, based on an agent’s perceived centrality in a subnetwork, measured within a fixed radius around the agent. These capture two measurements of network importance: objective and perceived (subjective). Agents have an incentive to form links so that they become key intermediaries in their (perceived) network and to bypass other key intermediaries in it. However, because payoffs are determined relative to other agents’ contributions, an agent might refrain from forming links if this would expose them to relatively more essential players. In case agents’ payoffs are global, the pairwise stable networks are connected and have at most one (central) agent with a nonzero payoff. In the case where agents’ payoffs are local, we describe the pairwise stable networks and some characteristics of the individual payoffs within them. A class of networks we call augmented stars (stars in which spokes may be connected but no cycle encompasses all spokes) is pairwise stable for both global and all possible local payoffs. |
| Keywords: | social networks, structural holes, network formation, intermediation |
| JEL: | C72 D85 |
| Date: | 2026–08–31 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cvh:coecwp:2026/03 |