The development of the Internet and mobile telephony has strengthened direct interactions between economic agents beyond traditional market structures and cooperative institutions. These interactions generate complex social networks that serve multiple purposes: facilitating communication, producing and disseminating technology, enhancing job search efficiency, and enabling the sharing of common interests and hobbies.
This course aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of social networks by characterizing their structure, describing their essential properties from a formal perspective (network topology, key metrics, small-world phenomena, etc.), and exploring their diverse applications in economics.
The first objective of this course is to characterize social networks precisely, describe their essential properties from a formal point of view (network topology, metrics, small-world effect, etc.), and examine their various applications in economics.
Importantly, theoretical concepts will not be introduced all at once. Rather, necessary definitions will be provided progressively throughout the course, as needed to support understanding of each section.
In this section, we analyze with a mean field approach (considering the influence of individual choices in sectorial patterns) the role of networks on technologies adoption (with applications on AI adoption).
In this section, we adopt a network-based approach, i.e., we focus on the specific network structure, and its heterogeneities. Specifically, we focus on two applications: recruitment (pointing out the role of strong and weak ties) and financial contagions (with application of centrality notions).
In this section, we study the percolation notion, and we study applciations on culture and/or fashion economics.
In this section, we introduce neural networks notion and mention important and disruptive applications in economics.
We last introduce games in network, and organize in the last session a ‘lab in the field’ experimental game between the students of the course, to test the influence of networks in the outcomes of a non-strategic game (a game in which participants have interest to cooperate)
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