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...

We study the fine-grained relationships among information flows, IT use,and individual information-worker productivity, by analyzing work at amidsize executive recruiting firm. We analyze both project-level andindividual-level performance using: (1) direct observation of over125,000 e-mail...

Researchers and practitioners increasingly are gaining access to data onexplicit social networks. For example, telecommunications and technologyfirms record data on consumer networks (via phone calls, emails,voice-over-IP, instant messaging), and social-network portal sites suchas MySpace,...

In this paper, I develop and estimate a dynamic model of strategicnetwork formation with heterogeneous agents. The main theoretical resultis the existence of a unique stationary equilibrium, which characterizesthe probability of observing a specific network in the data. As aconsequence, the...

This paper investigates how internet users' perception of control overtheir personal information affects how likely they are to click ononline advertising. The paper uses data from a randomized fieldexperiment that examined the relative effectiveness of personalizing adcopy to mesh with existing...

A criticism often levelled at poor HR practice is that practitioners "don’t know the business" or are "isolated in their ivory towers". However the diverse nature of the roles played by HR practitioners naturally leads to the development of networks not only within the organisation, but...

Sexual activity among adolescents is associated with risks such as pregnancy and STDs, and there is substantial policy interest in how peers influence the timing of sexual initiation. This paper measures separate effects for two social mechanisms--peer-group norms and partner availability--using...

MRQAP (Multiple Regression { Quadratic Assignment Procedure) tests are permutation tests for multiple regression coe±cients for data organized in square matrices instead of vectors. Such a data structure is typical in social network studies, where variables indicate some type of relation...

Most of the debate about online social networking sites, such as Facebook, has thus far revolved around questions of privacy and access to personal information. Users of such services, should they choose to exercise them, have a myriad of privacy options that allow them to restrict access to...