Most models of social contagion take peer exposure to be a corollary of adoption, yet in many settings, the visibility of one's adoption behavior happens through a separate decision process. In online systems, product designers can define how peer exposure mechanisms work: adoption behaviors can...

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...

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...

Online marketplace designers frequently run A/B tests to measure the impact of proposed product changes. However, given that marketplaces are inherently connected, total average treatment effect estimates obtained through Bernoulli randomized experiments are often biased due to violations of the...

Many internet firms use A/B tests to make product decisions. In an A/B test, the typical objective is to measure the total average treatment effect (TATE), which measures the difference between the average outcome if all users were treated and the average outcome if all users were untreated....

Understanding peer influence in networks is critical to estimating product demand and diffusion, creating effective viral marketing, and designing ‘network interventions’ to promote positive social change. But several statistical challenges make it difficult to econometrically identify peer...

Professors Iyengar, Van den Bulte and Valente (2010) (hereafter IVV) make deep nuanced contributions to our understanding of how opinion leadership and social contagion affect the adoption and diffusion of new products. Their work moves us forward not only by answering several fundamental...