Network Games

The articles by Bienenstock/Bonacich and Willer/Skvoretz claim similar goals: to explore ways that game theory and network exchange theory may inform one another. Willer and Skvoretz offer a method for conceptualizing the micro-processes of network exchange theory in game theoretic terms, and conduct empirical tests of the resulting new formulation. Bienenstock and Bonacich make explicit attempts to supplant network exchange formulations with game theory, revealing what they consider to be fatal weaknesses in the former and remedies in the latter. A thread that wends through both works is the desirability of understanding thoroughly how a micro-level phenomenon— choice —and a macro-level phenomenon— network —integrate to produce phenomena that do not exist outside the confluence of the two. After a brief examination of the terminological question `To what does the label “network exchange theory†refer?', I address a series of key issues in each of the articles.