Fresh SI: Newton & Sercombe on agency, potential and contagion

In a recent working paper, Jonathan Newton and Damian Sercombe consider the relationship between the aggregation of incentives at the individual level (using the mathematical tool of a potential function) and the aggregration of agency in decision making.

They find that the relationship between incentives and agency is related in striking ways to the payoffs of the underlying game they consider.

Results are proven by showing relationships between the pre-existing graph theoretic concepts of the close-knittedness and cohesion of sets of players whose interaction is mediated by a graph.

Read the full paper here.