Peer influence through word-of-mouth (WOM) plays an important role in many information systems but identification of causal effects is challenging. We identify causal WOM effects in the empirical setting of game adoption in a social network for gamers by exploiting differences in individuals’...

Many firms operate customer communities online. This is motivated by the belief that customers who join the community become more engaged with the firm and/or its products, and as a result, increase their economic activity with the firm. We describe this potential economic benefit as “social...

It is widely accepted in word-of-mouth (WOM) research that weak ties have a greater macro-level impact than strong ties on the spread of WOM and that marketers should thus intentionally stimulate WOM between weak ties to optimize a given WOM campaign. Here, we challenge this idea based on the...

We study how strangers become friends within an evolving online social network. By modeling the co-evolution of individual users' friendship tie formations and their concurrent online activities (product adoptions and content generation), we are able to discover important drivers underlying...

This paper studies the peer effect of iPhone adoptions in China. We use a unique data set of iPhone adoption records from a provincial capital city in China, in a span of over four years starting from iPhone's first introduction to mainland China. We construct a social network using six month's...

Peer-To-Peer advertising is the newest trend in the age of online advertising. The Facebook gift phenomenon or invention of Application directories in Orkut or rapidly increasing usage of Avatars in Second-Life, all lead to new market dynamics using the latest advertising mode. In this paper we...