Spontaneous emergence of social influence in online systems.

ABSTRACT: Social influence drives both offline and online human behavior. It pervades cultural markets, and manifests itself in the adoption of scientific and technical innovations as well as the spread of social practices. Prior empirical work on the diffusion of innovations in spatial regions or social networks has largely focused on the spread of one particular technology among a subset of all potential adopters. Here we choose an online context that allows us to study social influence processes by tracking the popularity of a complete set of applications installed by the user population of a social networking site, thus capturing the behavior of all individuals who can influence each other in this context. By extending standard fluctuation scaling methods, we analyze the collective behavior indu

SUBMITTER: Onnela JP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2972979 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature