Everyone has heard of the phrase “the rich-get-richer”, as it is often used to describe the inequality in economics. This theory cannot only be applied to economics, but it is also used in understanding networks and their power laws. When a network has a certain number of nodes, it usually gains new connections in proportion […]

Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?
This weekend’s New York Times Magazine has an article from Duncan Watts on the topic of network effects. The article covers many of the topics that we have covered in class, including the “rich get richer” effect and the MusicLab experiment. Watts draws from examples such as Harry […]

http://newsroom.eworldwire.com/view_release.php?id=16672
The problems caused by information cascades are clearly exemplified in the case of popular websites that display videos submitted by web-users for viewing by the general public. Most of these sites allow users to rank the videos, which are then sorted based on these ranks and the number of times they were viewed. The idea […]

In their essay Movie Marketing Strategy Formation with System Dynamics: Towards a multi-disciplinary adoption/diffusion theory of cinema-going, authors David Lane and Elke Hussman provide a thorough review of the adoption/diffusion mechanism and propose a model of “reinforcing and balancing loops” to explain the process. We discussed cinema-advertising as an example of adoption/diffusion during class, and […]

Lothar Krempel and Michael Schnegg (2005) “About the Image: Diffusion Dynamics in an
Historical Network”, Structure and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences:
Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 10.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/imbs/socdyn/sdeas/vol1/iss1/art10
This paper discusses how the structure of a social network influences history and the spread of ideas in a medium-sized German town.  This is accomplished by creating and […]

Recently, much work has been done to investigate the structure and dynamics of large social networks. Through datasets from online social networking sites, computer scientists are given an unprecedented look into the networks many of us form everyday. One of the key research questions that has arisen is about the growth of online […]

 
Informational Cascades in the Laboratory: Do They Occur for the Right Reasons?
(Postscript reader/Download required)
This is an older article about information cascades and how laboratory experiments can give results which coincide with theory, but perhaps may not be for the right reasons. There are more than a few sources which I have read which […]

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/viruspaper/version.PDF
We’ve been discussing network diffusion in class recently – namely, how a trend propagates throughout a network. The paper above analyzes viruses, one such “trend.” It explores the effect of tightly- and loosely-knit networks on several types of viruses. Specifically, the paper compares biological viruses, computer viruses, and viral marketing.
The paper first identifies two extremes […]

While doing one of my normal perusals of Wikipedia, I came across some assertions on the value of social networks relative to their sizes. Metcalfe’s law, which was originally applied to early Ethernet networks, states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users. This makes […]

http://www.atsweb.neu.edu/w.carl/PDFs/colleagues/LSE_AdvocacyDrivesGrowth.pdf
This paper summarizes the results of a study conducted on the effects of word of mouth advocacy on the growth of businesses. The study observed word of mouth communication in two areas: Postive Word of Mouth (PWOM) and Negative Word of Mouth (NWOM). The authors used a point scoring system developed by Net Promoter […]