Economic Properties of Social Networks

Sham M. Kakade, Michael J. Kearns, Luis E. Ortiz, Robin Pemantle, Siddharth Suri

Abstract: We examine the marriage of recent probabilistic generative models for social networks with classical frameworks from mathematical eco- nomics. We are particularly interested in how the statistical structure of such networks influences global economic quantities such as price vari- ation. Our findings are a mixture of formal analysis, simulation, and experiments on an international trade data set from the United Nations.