There has been a considerable amount of interest in the empirical investigation of social influence in the marketing and economics literature in the last decade or so. Among the many different empirical models applied for such investigations, the most common class of model is the linear-in-means...

In many consumption settings (e.g., restaurants), individuals consume products either alone or with their peers (e.g., friends). In this study, we propose a general framework for modeling peer effects by including two new peer effects, the exogenous peer effect (exogenous factors that could...

We quantify the impact of social interactions and peer effects in the context of prescription choices by physicians. Using detailed individual-level prescription data, along with self-reported social network information, we document that physician prescription behavior is significantly...

Peer referrals are a common strategy for addressing asymmetric information in contexts such as the labor market. They could be especially valuable for increasing testing and treatment of infectious diseases, where peers may have advantages over health workers in both identifying new patients and...

We study whether and how peer referrals increase screening, testing, and identification of patients with tuberculosis, an infectious disease responsible for over one million deaths annually. In an experiment with 3,176 patients at 122 tuberculosis treatment centers in India, we find that small...