Essays on Networks, Information Economics, and Dynamic Games of Populism and Conflict

This thesis focuses on developing tools and models for studying strategic interaction among agents in dynamics games. This dissertation consists of one pure theory paper and two applied theory papers. The first chapter develops a general result in differential games. This is an area for studying strategic interactions when agents are forward-looking and calculate their future strategic interactions. The second and third chapters deal with the problem of strategic interactions under incomplete information, in the context of networks. In the second chapter, the analytical tools for linking up strategic actions with the evolution of a network are developed. The last chapter extends the second chapter by recommending network-manager strategies that can lead to welfare-improving network evolution under incomplete information. The thesis presents the first studies to propose a search and matching mechanism of network friends in an environment of incomplete information, higher-order beliefs, and evolutionary dynamics.