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Trust In Cohesive Communities, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof., Juan Escobar Assistant Professor
Trust In Cohesive Communities, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof., Juan Escobar Assistant Professor
Felipe Balmaceda
This paper studies which social networks maximize trust and welfare when agreements are implicitly enforced. We study a repeated trust game in which trading opportunities arise exogenously and a social network determines the information each player has. We show that cohesive communities, modeled as social networks of complete components, emerge as the optimal community design. Cohesive communities generate some degree of common knowledge of transpired play that allows players to coordinate their punishments and, as a result, yield relatively high equilibrium payoffs. We also show that when news swiftly travel through the network, Pareto efficient networks are minimally connected: the …