Social interaction among individuals with a preference for conformity gives rise to coordination externalities which are not internalized in a non-cooperative setting. Mandating behavioral conformity, by centrally imposing a common, group-wide action, internalizes these coordination...

The focus of this paper is the endogenous formation of peer groups. In our model, agents choose peers before making contributions to public projects, and they differ in how much they value one project relative to another. Thus, the groups preference composition affects the type of contributions...

We study a population of first year midshipmen within an elite military academy to explore the relationship between individuals’ sociometric status (e.g., status conferrals based on positive interpersonal affect and perceived competence, and status degradations based on negative interpersonal...

The 'friendship paradox' (Feld1991) refers to the fact that, on average, people have strictly fewer friends than their friends have. I show that this over-sampling of the most popular people amplifies behaviors that involve complementarities. People with more friends experience greater...

Social interaction (peer) effects are recognized as a potentially important factor in the diffusion of new products. In the case of environmentally friendly goods or technologies, both marketers and policy makers are interested in the presence of causal peer effects as social spillovers can be...

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...

Social interaction (peer) effects are recognized as a potentially important factor in the diffusion of new products. In the case of environmentally friendly goods or technologies, both marketers and policy makers are interested in the presence of causal peer effects as social spillovers can be...

We study the effect of peer influence in the diffusion of the iPhone 3G across a number of communities sampled from a large dataset from a major European Mobile carrier in one country. We identify tight communities of users in which peer influence may play a role and use instrumental variables...

We study how multi-attribute product choices are affected by peer influence. We propose a two-stage conjoint based approach to examine three behavioral mechanisms of peer influence. We find that when faced with information on peer choices, consumers update their attribute preferences in a...

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...