This paper studies the strategic network formation in a location-based social network. We build an empirical model of social link creation that incorporates individual characteristics and pairwise user similarities. Specifically, we define four user proximity measures from biography, geography,...

In recent years, there has been stellar growth of location-based/enabled social networks in which people can “check-in” to physical venues they are visiting and share with friends. In this article, we hypothesize that the “check-ins” made by friends help users learn the potential payoff...

For social networking platforms like Facebook, understanding the peer effects on it can be valuable to many applications, such as designing efficient advertisements with social endorsement. Therefore, we propose a statistical methodology that provides such understanding. These platforms contain...