A central idea in marketing and diffusion research is that influentials-a minority of individuals who influence an exceptional number of their peers-are important to the formation of public opinion. Here we examine this idea, which we call the "influentials hypothesis," using a series of...

The origin of large but rare cascades that are triggered by small initial shocks is a problem that manifests itself in social and natural phenomena as diverse as cultural fads and innovations [1-3], social movements [4, 5], and cascading failures in large infrastructure networks [6-8]. Here we...