Seeking Relationship Support: Strategic network formation and robust cooperation

We study cooperation on social networks with private monitoring and communication.
For arbitrary networks, we construct a class of multilateral restitution equilibria
that attain high cooperation on all supported links"”i.e., all links that are in triangles.
These equilibria are robust to social contagion, bilaterally renegotiation proof, and invariant
to players' beliefs about the network outside their local neighborhoods. In these
equilibria, guilty players are not ostracized, instead they remain to sustain the stability
of the cooperation network by exerting high effort for their innocent partners, and they
are willing to do so because they are compensated for their effort costs. Anticipating
cooperation, players in a network formation game with random opportunities to form
links will strategically form a network with realistic small worlds properties, including
high support but relatively low clustering.
David Miller is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2004, and was previously an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego.

His main research area is repeated game models of cooperative behavior, with a particular focus on methods for narrowing the set of relevant equilibria, motivated by a concern for realism. His research has explored how the potential for renegotiation and disagreement influences the design of optimal self-enforcing contracts, how social networks help communities support cooperative behavior, and how asymmetric information constrains the extent to which cartels can robustly collude.