This dissertation comprises three essays that study online demand coming from local offline markets. In the first essay, I study two social influence effects reflected in physical proximity and in demographic similarity, respectively, on online demand evolution. As these effects can be...

Social interactions in a community influence perceptions and values of members of the community. Recently Web 2.0 technologies have stimulated rapid growth of online communities, where communications between participants are made much easier. It is important to study how participants' behaviors...

The study explores the importance of social influence and the availability of health insurance on maternal care utilization in Ghana through the use of antenatal care services. A number of studies have found that access to health insurance plays a critical role in women’s decision to utilize...

Heinz Klein was a fine scholar and mentor whose work and life have inspired us to explore the notion of ‘scholarly influence’ which we cast as ‘ideational’ and ‘social influence’. We adopt a portfolio of measures approach, using the Hirsch family of statistics to assess ideational...

We address the cooperation problem in structured populations by considering the prisoner’s dilemma game as a metaphor of the social interactions between individuals with imitation capacity. We present a new strategy update rule called democratic weighted update where the individual’s...

Previous studies mainly consider the random selection pattern in which individuals randomly choose reference models from their neighbors for strategy updating. However, the random selection pattern is unable to capture all real world circumstances. We institute a spatial model to investigate the...

I develop a theoretical model of price discrimination under social influence. I find that social influence gives sellers the incentive to artificially create and maintain excess demand on the market. The rationing occurs mainly at the low end of the market, and sometimes results in full...

The purpose of this paper is to gain a better understanding, through qualitative exploration, of the ways in which social influence affects the decision to start bicycling in England. ‘Social influence’ is defined as the process by which an individual’s thoughts and actions are changed by...

In this paper, we propose an opinion dynamics model in order to investigate opinion evolution and interactions and the behavior of individuals. By introducing social influence and its feedback mechanism, the proposed model can highlight the heterogeneity of individuals and reproduce realistic...

We study a system in which N agents have to decide between two strategies θi(i ∈ 1 … N), for defection or cooperation, when interacting with other n agents (either spatial neighbors or randomly chosen ones). After each round, they update their strategy responding nonlinearly to two...