Managers and researchers alike suspect that the vast amounts of qualitative information found in blogs, product reviews, real estate listings, news stories, analyst reports and experts' advice influence consumer behavior. But, do these kinds of qualitative information impact or rather reflect...

Identifying causal estimates of peer-to-peer influence in networks is critical to marketing strategy, public policy and beyond. Unfortunately, separating correlation from causation in networked data is complicated. We argue that randomized experimentation in networks, made possible by the...