VI Summer School (2003)

The Role of Social Interactions and Networks in Economics

A summer school organized by the University of the Basque Country and the Urrutia Elejalde Foundation.
San Sebastián, July 21-24(2003)

Director: Matthew O. Jackson (Caltech) & Antoni Calvó-Armengol (UAB)

Coordinator: Alfonso Dubois (UPV/EHU)

Many interactions involve network relationships. For this reason, social and economic networks often determine the economic success of individuals and, thereby, play a prominent role in explaining a wide range of economic phenomena. A classical example is the exchange and diffusion of information, critical to the functioning of most labor markets. Other examples include the trade and exchange of goods in non centralized markets, the provision of mutual insurance in developing countries, the spread of technological innovations that breed economic growth, the interlocking of firms to share R&D efforts, etc. During the last decade, a flowering literature has undertaken a systematic theoretical and empirical scrutiny of the role played by networks in economics. In an attempt to understand how the shape of the network frames agents decisions, an important part of the literature relates the specifics of the network structure to predicted behavior in a variety of contexts. The endogenous creation of social networks is also a recurrent theme of analysis, and different concepts and models to describe endogenously emerging structures have been proposed and discussed. On the empirical side, efforts have concentrated on the detection and measurement of network effects in the data, and the identification of the network relationships underlying observed patterns of behavior. The summer school brings together scholars with different but complementary sensibilities with have been actively contributing to this field in the recent years. For this reason, the meeting should provide a unique opportunity both to get a complete an accurate view of the state-of-the-art of the research in this area, and to get a sense of the open questions and future perspectives of this promising new field in economics research.

Lecturers: Francis Bloch (GREQAM); Antoni Calvó-Armengol (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona); Baskhar Dutta (University of Warwick); Matthew O. Jackson (California Institute of Technology); Rachel Kranton (University of Maryland); Joel Sobel (University of California San Diego); Giorgio Topa (New York University); Fernando Vega-Redondo (Universidad de Alicante).

 

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