Social Interactions and the Effectiveness of Urban Policies

Why does the implementation of urban policies with similar characteristics achieve disparate results? Why do the same policies work in certain social and economic environments, but not in others? What are the reasons explaining the varied outcomes? This presentation claims that social interactions, including neighborhood and network effects, may play a key role at explaining the effectiveness of urban policies. It is argued that the availability of new and better information, such as recent data obtained from social experiments, might provide new insights on how non-market interactions may condition policy interventions in an urban setting.