Network Formation: An experimental Approach to Co-authorship Patterns.

The attention devoted by economists to networks has been increasing significantly in recent years, nevertheless we witness a lack of experimental investigation of the In this paper we are concerned with network formation in the context of collaborative behaviour; that is to say, we want to study the way in which networks emerge in a cooperative setting and their features in terms of efficiency and stability, by letting people play connections games in a controlled laboratory environment. The aim of this paper is to provide a first insight into the process of network formation in the more specific context of collaborative networks. Following the co-author model by Jackson & Wolinsky (1996) and its experimental implementation suggested by Vanin (2002), two co-author games have been designed in order to shed light on the emergence of the trade-off between network stability and efficiency.