User-generated content (UGC) platforms have increasingly adopted digital badges as a key mechanism to incentivize user engagement. Drawing from the extant literature, the authors theorize that digital badges can have an enduring effect on UGC consumption and creation beyond immediate effects...

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...

We quantify the effects of others' adoptions and word-of-mouth (volume and valence) on consumers' product adoption decisions. We differentiate between the effects of word-of-mouth and observed adoptions from friends ("personal network") and the effects of word-of-mouth and observed adoptions...