It has been widely recognized that the poor spends a significant proportion of their income on social spending even at the expense of basic consumption. What are the motives behind the observed lavish social spending among the poor? We attempt to test three competing explanations at the social...

Recent social spending inflation in China has led to its growth rate far exceeding that of income and other consumption. In this paper, we estimate private returns to social spending, such as higher social status and larger social network that serve as certain functions. In almost all...

The tradition of keeping written records of gift received during household ceremonies in many countries offers researchers an underutilized means of data collection for social network analysis. This paper first summarizes unique features of the gift record data that circumvent five prevailing...

It is well established in the literature that customer retention is at least as important as customer acquisition, especially in the freemium-based virtual economy, in which individuals are connected by multi-relational social networks, such as the “friendships” and “guilds” (virtual...

This paper aims to understand the effects of online communities on the network structure and their marketing implications. To account for the fact that communities are not formed exogenously, we model and estimate how they co-evolve with the friendship network. We control for unobserved...

We consider a model of network interactions where the outcome of a unit depends on the outcomes of the connected units. We determine the key network link, i.e., the network link whose removal results in the largest reduction in the aggregate outcomes, and provide a measure that quantifies the...

Web applications that feature online social networking functions have significantly influenced human social interactions. The availability of data sets on online social connections and user activities calls for innovative big-data analytic methods. This study proposes a model of tie strength in...