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Full-Text Articles in Business
Identifying Social Influence In Networks Using Randomized Experiments, Sinan Aral, Dylan Walker
Identifying Social Influence In Networks Using Randomized Experiments, Sinan Aral, Dylan Walker
Business Faculty Articles and Research
The recent availability of massive amounts of networked data generated by email, instant messaging, mobile phone communications, micro blogs, and online social networks is enabling studies of population-level human interaction on scales orders of magnitude greater than what was previously possible.1'2 One important goal of applying statistical inference techniques to large networked datasets is to understand how behavioral contagions spread in human social networks. More precisely, understanding how people influence or are influenced by their peers can help us understand the ebb and flow of market trends, product adoption and diffusion, the spread of health behaviors such as smoking and …
Creating Social Contagion Through Viral Product Design: A Randomized Trial Of Peer Influence In Networks, Sinan Aral, Dylan Walker
Creating Social Contagion Through Viral Product Design: A Randomized Trial Of Peer Influence In Networks, Sinan Aral, Dylan Walker
Business Faculty Articles and Research
We examine how firms can create word-of-mouth peer influence and social contagion by designing viral features into their products and marketing campaigns. To econometrically identify the effectiveness of different viral features in creating social contagion, we designed and conducted a randomized field experiment involving the 1.4 million friends of 9,687 experimental users on Facebook.com. We find that viral features generate econometrically identifiable peer influence and social contagion effects. More surprisingly, we find that passive-broadcast viral features generate a 246% increase in peer influence and social contagion, whereas adding active-personalized viral features generate only an additional 98% increase. Although active-personalized viral …
The Structural Importance Of Consumer Networks, Seung Hwan (Mark) Lee
The Structural Importance Of Consumer Networks, Seung Hwan (Mark) Lee
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This dissertation contains three essays that investigate how a consumer’s social network position (i.e., a person’s location within a web of relationships) plays an important role in the way that consumer influences and exchanges information with others. Using social capital theory as the conceptual framework, I demonstrate that a consumer’s location within a network (network centrality) has an effect on their ability to influence others and, conversely, on others’ ability to influence them. I also show that network positions influence the type of information that is sought from others (information about the self or information about others). Moreover, I demonstrate …
Mobile Application Adoption By Young Adults: A Social Network Perspective, David G. Taylor, Troy A. Voelker, Iryna Pentina
Mobile Application Adoption By Young Adults: A Social Network Perspective, David G. Taylor, Troy A. Voelker, Iryna Pentina
WCBT Faculty Publications
The use of mobile applications, defined as small programs that run on a mobile device and perform tasks ranging from banking to gaming and web browsing, is exploding. Within the past two years, the industry has grown from essentially nothing to a $2 billion marketplace, but adoption rates are still on the rise. Using network theory, this study examines how the adoption of mobile apps among young consumers is influenced by others in their social network. The results suggest that the likelihood of adoption and usage of mobile apps increases with their use by the consumer's strongest relationship partner. In …