Lugar: Sala de Reuniones del Departamento de Economía nº 2026 (2ª planta del Edificio Los Madroños).

Ponente:  Sofía Ruiz Palazuelos (Aix-Marseille School of Economics)

Título: Network Perception in Network Games

Abstract: In many situations, people make decisions based on the actions of others, but have incomplete information about the social structure they form. This paper presents a novel approach to the analysis of network games based on group theory. I propose a model of Bayesian updating in which players have incomplete information about the network they are part of, and form beliefs about it based on a set of signals before playing the game. I characterize posteriors for a variety of information setups, and provide conditions under which equilibrium actions depend monotonically on certain aspects of players’ network position (e.g., on their number of friends). The conditions relate network information to the distribution of players in the set of feasible networks, and allow the design of information structures compatible with monotone equilibria. Moreover, they show that, regardless of the structure of the network that players are part of, equilibrium outcomes tend to be more influenced by the topology of networks that are more asymmetric, among all those compatible with their information.