Tractability and Phase Transitions in Endogenous Network Formation

Abstract

The dynamics of network formation are generally very complex, making the study of distributions over the space of networks often intractable. Under a condition called conservativeness, I show that the stationary distribution of a network formation process can be found in closed form, and is given by a Gibbs measure. For conservative processes, the stationary distribution of a certain class of models can be characterized for an arbitrarily large number of players. In this limit, the statistical properties of the model can exhibit phase transitions: discontinuous changes as a response to continuous changes in model parameters.

39 pages; 6 figures; appendices included