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Full-Text Articles in Business
Tie Strength, Embeddedness, And Social Influence: A Large-Scale Networked Experiment, Sinan Aral, Dylan Walker
Tie Strength, Embeddedness, And Social Influence: A Large-Scale Networked Experiment, Sinan Aral, Dylan Walker
Business Faculty Articles and Research
We leverage the newly emerging business analytical capability to rapidly deploy and iterate large-scale, microlevel, in vivo randomized experiments to understand how social influence in networks impacts consumer demand. Understanding peer influence is critical to estimating product demand and diffusion, creating effective viral marketing, and designing “network interventions” to promote positive social change. But several statistical challenges make it difficult to econometrically identify peer influence in networks. Though some recent studies use experiments to identify influence, they have not investigated the social or structural conditions under which influence is strongest. By randomly manipulating messages sent by adopters of a Facebook …
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 …