Nov 20, 2013 Filed in: Working papers
With S. Nageeb Ali
Abstract: Which social norms and networks maximize cooperation in bilateral relationships? We study a network of players in which each link is a repeated bilateral partnership with two-sided moral hazard. The obstacle to community enforcement is that each player observes the behavior of her partners in their partnerships with her, but not how they behave in other partnerships. We introduce a new metric for the rate at which information diffuses in a network, which we call viscosity, and show that it provides an operational measure for how conducive a network is to cooperation. We prove that clique networks have the lowest viscosity and that the optimal equilibrium of the clique generates more cooperation and higher average utility than any other equilibrium of any other network. This result offers a strategic foundation for the perspective that tightly knit groups foster the most cooperation.
Working paper 11/20/2013