Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 17 (NIPS 2004)
Sham M. Kakade, Michael Kearns, Luis E. Ortiz, Robin Pemantle, Siddharth Suri
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.