Complex Social Networks

Fernando Vega-Redondo is Professor of Economics at the University of Alicante, Spain and the University of Essex, UK. He also taught at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and has held visiting positions at Harvard University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of California-San Diego, Boston University and Cornell University. Professor Vega-Redondo is the author of Economics and the Theory of Games (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Evolution, Games, and Economic Behavior (1996). He has written more than 70 articles in professional journals, including the Journal of Economic Theory, Econometrica, International Economic Review, and Games and Economic Behavior. Professor Vega-Redondo received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1984.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Complex networks: basic theory; 3. Epidemic diffusion; 4. Neighborhood effects in diffusion and play; 5. Searching in social networks; 6. Search, diffusion, and play in coevolving networks; Afterword; Appendix A. Generating functions; Appendix B. The Ising model; Appendix C. Mean-field theory.

“Fernando Vega Redondo's timely monograph provides a nice introduction to and overview of the rapidly growing literature on complex networks, which spans a number of literatures including statistical physics, graph theory, economics, sociology, and computer science. He provides the essentials to a reader interested in large random graph models of networks. This should be a helpful reference for the broadening set of researchers studying social networks.” --Matthew Jackson, Stanford University