I develop a model of bilateral conversations in which players may honestly exchange ideas with their competitors. The key to incentive compatibility is a strong form of complementarity in the information structure: a player can only generate a useful new insight on a given topic if he has access to his counterpart's previous thoughts on the topic. I then embed this model into a linear social network in which player A first can have a conversation with player B, then player B can have a conversation with player C, and so on. I show that relatively underdeveloped ideas can travel long distances over the network and thus be shared by many agents. More valuable ideas, by contrast, tend to remain localized among small groups of agents.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
13370.
Length: Date of creation: Sep 2007 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13370
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Find related papers by JEL classification: D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search, Learning, and Information
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Mathias Dewatripont & Jean Tirole, 2005.
"Modes of Communication,"
Journal of Political Economy,
University of Chicago Press, vol. 113(6), pages 1217-1238, December.
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