Department of Economics
Littauer Center Room 308
Harvard University

ben.golub [at] gmail.com

Benjamin Golub is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and will begin an appointment as Assistant Professor at the Harvard Department of Economics in 2015. His research focuses on social and economic networks: how these networks form when agents invest strategically in relationships, how information is transmitted through them, and how they mediate important economic processes such as group cooperation. The results have applications to issues of trade, negotiations over the provision of public goods, political communication, and the media. He is interested in applications of this research to developing economies, where informal social connections often stand in for missing formal institutions. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 2011. Benjamin maintains his own personal/research website here:

https://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~bgolub/

Principal Publications

"How Homophily Affects the Speed of Learning and Best-Response Dynamics" (with Matthew O. Jackson). Quarterly Journal of Economics, 127(3), forthcoming.

"Naive Learning in Social Networks and the Wisdom of Crowds" (with Matthew O. Jackson). American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2(1):112-149; February 2010.

"Using Selection Bias to Explain the Observed Structure of Internet Diffusions" (with Matthew O. Jackson). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(24):10833-10836; June 15, 2010.

"Strategic Random Networks and Tipping Points in Network Formation" (with Yair Livne). Working paper.