(Picture Source: Pixabay)

(Correspondent: Zhong Yiming) Recently, our Assistant Professor, Ding Sihua, published a collaborative paper titled Clubs and Networks as the first and corresponding author in the 147th issue of Games and Economic Behavior in 2024.

This paper proposes a new model of club and network formation that provides new perspectives for understanding individual marginalization as well as the formation of small and large circles. In this model, individuals seek to join clubs, which have capacity constraints. When an individual joins two clubs at the same time, a link is established between these two clubs. The goal of the clubs is to maximize productivity, which increases with the strength of the links to other clubs. The authors found that the stabilization outcome exhibits marginal properties, i.e., a few individuals exhaust their membership while others do not join any clubs, or a few clubs are fully occupied while others are empty. Furthermore, they found that when the returns to link strength is a convex function, the resulting club networks tend to be composed of fragmented, strongly-linked small groups. In contrast, when the returns to link strength is a convex function, the resulting club network tend to be well-connected with weak links.

Games and Economic Behavior is widely recognized as a prestigious journal in the field of economics and is classified as an A-level foreign academic journal by the School of Economics at Nankai University.