In game theory, the question of convergence of dynamical systems to the set of Nash equilibria has often been tackled. When the game admits a continuum of Nash equilibria, however, a natural and challenging question is whether convergence to the set of Nash equilibria implies convergence to a Nash equilibrium. In this paper we introduce a technique developed in Bhat and Bernstein (2003) as a useful way to answer this question. We illustrate it with the best-response dynamics in the local public good game played on a network, where continua of Nash equilibria often appear.

We propose a dynastic model where individuals are born into an educated or uneducated environment that they inherit from their parents. We study the impact of social interactions on the correlation in parent-child educational status, independently of any parent-child interaction. When the level of social interactions is decided by a social planner, we show that the correlation in education status between generations decreases very fast as social interactions increase. In turn, when the level of social interactions is decided by the individuals themselves, we show that the intergenerational correlation still decreases, although less rapidly than with exogenous social interactions.

We address the problem of a planner looking for the efficient network when agents play a network game with local complementarities and links are costly. We show that for general network cost functions, efficient networks belong to the class of Nested-Split Graphs. Next, we refine our results and find that, depending on the specification of the network cost function, complete networks, core-periphery networks, dominant group architectures, quasi-star and quasi-complete networks can be efficient.

In this article we construct a network of roads connecting large Indian cities and we evaluate this network’s overall performance. We consider a model where the production efforts of connected cities are strategic complements, and we relate the equilibrium effort profile to a well known centrality measure, the Katz-Bonacich centrality. We then make use of this result to compute the level of efforts of different cities in the current network and identify which city contributes most to overall efforts, which existing road is the most influential and which new road should be constructed in priority. Our results shed light on the importance of relatively small cities on aggregate efforts. Our exercise illustrates how network details might generate unexpected effects.
JEL: C72, D85