Markus Kinateder, professor at department of Economics of the School of Economics, has published the article "Public Goods in Endogenous Networks" in the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics. The journal is one of the world's highest impact scientific journals, whose papers address issues such as microeconomic theory, industrial organization and microeconomic aspects of international trade, economic policy and finance.

"Public Goods in Endogenous Networks" is a joint work by Professor Kinateder and Luca Paolo Merlino, an academic at the Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne.

The professor himself sample us a synthesis of his article "Public Goods in Endogenous Networks" (whose publication in the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics is imminent). "The article is based on the influential article by Galeotti and Goyal published in 2010 in one of the top five journals in the field Economics, the American Economic Review. Galeotti and Goyal were the first to theoretically study the strategic interaction that exists between actors who choose a given level of effort and with whom to interact in the local public goods arena. In our article, we extrapolate their result to heterogeneous actors who share neither the cost of such effort nor the economic evaluation of the public goods in question. It is very surprising that, although both sources of heterogeneity offer identical results in an isolated context (without belonging to a network), they generate very different stable interrelational Structures when the network is endogenous.

This finding is important for the empirical work , since many situations have similarities with the local public goods domain: for example, when different consumers collect information about products and discuss it among themselves, or when farmers decide how much fertilizer to use after observing how others use it.

In addition to many other theoretically relevant results, another of the contributions of article is the demonstration that the origin of heterogeneity is important in determining whether or not differences between actors increase. When actors economically value a public good differently, for example, because wealthy people want to consume it to a greater extent, inequality among the population increases. On the other hand, it decreases if what does not coincide is the cost of providing such a good".