Aproximació de la teoria de Grafs als models de xarxes econòmiques

Abstract

Economic networks are present in the substrate of our social and economic lives. They are important in determining which products we buy, which languages we speak, how we vote, how much education we obtain, and our likelihood of succeeding professionally. They play a central role in the transmission of information about job opportunities and are critical to the trade of many goods and services. The countless ways in which network structures a ect our well-being make it critical to understand how social network structures impact behavior, which network structures are likely to emerge in a society, and why we organize ourselves as we do. Despite, as we have seen before, economic networks play an important role in a wide range of economic phenomena, standard economic theory rarely considers them explicitly in its analysis. However, in the last years, a major innovation in economic theory has been the use of methods stemming from graph theory to describe and study relations between economic agents in networks. This recent development has lead to a fast increase in theoretical research on economic networks. In this tutorial, we introduce the reader to some basic concepts used in a wide range of models of economic networks. The purpose of this paper is to give an approach to models of economic networks using the points of view mathematical and economical, and explain how these models works in the economic world. Speci cally, from mathematics we use the graph theory, and from economy the game theory and the economic network theory. First, let us establish the conceptual framework that mathematics and economics provide to study the games on economic networks. Secondly, we are going to study and analyze, using modeling tools, the properties of games on innovation networks that are an illustrative example of the models that the economic network theory studies. Finally we are going to summarize the results of this modeling and explain some aspects of how economic networks operate in the economy.