20,140 research outputs found
Modeling the adoption of innovations in the presence of geographic and media influences
While there has been much work examining the affects of social network
structure on innovation adoption, models to date have lacked important features
such as meta-populations reflecting real geography or influence from mass media
forces. In this article, we show these are features crucial to producing more
accurate predictions of a social contagion and technology adoption at the city
level. Using data from the adoption of the popular micro-blogging platform,
Twitter, we present a model of adoption on a network that places friendships in
real geographic space and exposes individuals to mass media influence. We show
that homopholy both amongst individuals with similar propensities to adopt a
technology and geographic location are critical to reproduce features of real
spatiotemporal adoption. Furthermore, we estimate that mass media was
responsible for increasing Twitter's user base two to four fold. To reflect
this strength, we extend traditional contagion models to include an endogenous
mass media agent that responds to those adopting an innovation as well as
influencing agents to adopt themselves
Adoption as a Social Marker: Innovation Diffusion with Outgroup Aversion
Social identities are among the key factors driving behavior in complex
societies. Signals of social identity are known to influence individual
behaviors in the adoption of innovations. Yet the population-level consequences
of identity signaling on the diffusion of innovations are largely unknown. Here
we use both analytical and agent-based modeling to consider the spread of a
beneficial innovation in a structured population in which there exist two
groups who are averse to being mistaken for each other. We investigate the
dynamics of adoption and consider the role of structural factors such as
demographic skew and communication scale on population-level outcomes. We find
that outgroup aversion can lead to adoption being delayed or suppressed in one
group, and that population-wide underadoption is common. Comparing the two
models, we find that differential adoption can arise due to structural
constraints on information flow even in the absence of intrinsic between-group
differences in adoption rates. Further, we find that patterns of polarization
in adoption at both local and global scales depend on the details of
demographic organization and the scale of communication. This research has
particular relevance to widely beneficial but identity-relevant products and
behaviors, such as green technologies, where overall levels of adoption
determine the positive benefits that accrue to society at large.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figure
Uneven geographies of organizational practice: explaining the cross-national transfer and adoption of ISO 9000
There is growing recognition that organizational innovations can have a major influence on the geography of economic activity. Yet, very little is known about the mechanisms and geographic preconditions underlying their diffusion, particularly at the global level. In this paper we seek to fill this gap using the example of ISO 9000, the internationally- recognized set of standards for quality management. We develop a series of hypotheses about the conditions under which organizations are most likely to adopt ISO 9000. These hypotheses are then tested using panel data for 130 countries over the period 1995-2001. Our findings support the idea that transnational network ties linking countries to the wider global community influence adoption decisions. Thus, exports to the EU and Japan, local involvement of transnational corporations (TNCs), colonial ties to Europe and the availability of telecommunications, all emerge as statistically significant determinants of ISO 9000 counts. Our results also underscore the importance of national environmental conditions. Low regulatory burden, a high share of manufacturing activity, high rates of secondary school enrolment and low levels of productivity are positively associated with a high number of certificates. We conclude that globalization has increased the mobility of organizational innovations across national borders. Yet, country- level variations in (a) transnational network linkages and (b) environmental conditions influencing the receptiveness of organizations to new economic practices, suggest that spatial unevenness is an inevitable feature of organizational diffusion at the global level.ISO 9000, standards, cross-national diffusion, globalization, institutionalism
Innovation and Diffusion
The contribution made by innovation and new technologies to economic growth and welfare is largely determined by the rate and manner by which innovations diffuse throughout the relevant population, but this topic has been a somewhat neglected one in the economics of innovation. This chapter, written for a handbook on innovation, provides a historical and comparative perspective on diffusion that looks at the broad determinants of diffusion, economic, social, and institutional, viewed from a microeconomic perspective. A framework for thinking about these determinants is presented along with a brief nontechnical review of modeling strategies used in different social scientific literatures. It concludes with a discussion of gaps in our understanding and potential future research questions.
Traveling Trends: Social Butterflies or Frequent Fliers?
Trending topics are the online conversations that grab collective attention
on social media. They are continually changing and often reflect exogenous
events that happen in the real world. Trends are localized in space and time as
they are driven by activity in specific geographic areas that act as sources of
traffic and information flow. Taken independently, trends and geography have
been discussed in recent literature on online social media; although, so far,
little has been done to characterize the relation between trends and geography.
Here we investigate more than eleven thousand topics that trended on Twitter in
63 main US locations during a period of 50 days in 2013. This data allows us to
study the origins and pathways of trends, how they compete for popularity at
the local level to emerge as winners at the country level, and what dynamics
underlie their production and consumption in different geographic areas. We
identify two main classes of trending topics: those that surface locally,
coinciding with three different geographic clusters (East coast, Midwest and
Southwest); and those that emerge globally from several metropolitan areas,
coinciding with the major air traffic hubs of the country. These hubs act as
trendsetters, generating topics that eventually trend at the country level, and
driving the conversation across the country. This poses an intriguing
conjecture, drawing a parallel between the spread of information and diseases:
Do trends travel faster by airplane than over the Internet?Comment: Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Online social networks,
pp. 213-222, 201
The international diffusion of new technologies: a multi-technology analysis of latecomer advantage and global economic integration
The diffusion of modern, efficient technology has far-reaching consequences for the geography of economic activity, inequality and environmental quality. This article examines two popular yet highly controversial claims about the conditions most favorable to the rapid spread of new technology. The first states that latecomer advantage allows developing countries to diffuse new technology faster than developed countries. The second claim, widely articulated by advocates of neo-liberal policy reform, is that new technologies diffuse more rapidly where countries are “open” to international trade and investment. To investigate these claims we use event-history analysis to estimate the determinants of diffusion speed across a large panel of developed and developing countries for three very different technologies. These are: continuous steel casting, shuttleless textile weaving looms and digital telephone mainlines. Our results broadly support both propositions. Countries which adopt new technology later or have a smaller existing capital stock – characteristic features of developing countries – diffuse new technology more rapidly than countries that adopt earlier or have more installed capacity – two characteristics of developed countries. Trade openness is also found to influence the rate of diffusion positively for all three technologies. Yet, consistent with recent empirical studies, we fail to find support for the idea that foreign direct investment (FDI) accelerates the diffusion of new technology in host economies. The paper concludes by discussing the geographical implications of our findings.Diffusion, globalization, industrialization, latecomer, technology
An Integrated Approach to Policy Transfer and Diffusion
This article reviews the existing literature on policy transfer and diffusion and offers a more integrated theory for examining the spreading of policy. Typical studies have treated each as separate, yet they are similar in many respects. For example, both involve many of the same agents and processes involved in the spreading of policy. This article integrates the two literatures by developing a theoretical continuum upon which varying degrees of policy diffusion occur
The role of geography in the complex diffusion of innovations
The urban-rural divide is increasing in modern societies calling for
geographical extensions of social influence modelling. Improved understanding
of innovation diffusion across locations and through social connections can
provide us with new insights into the spread of information, technological
progress and economic development. In this work, we analyze the spatial
adoption dynamics of iWiW, an Online Social Network (OSN) in Hungary and
uncover empirical features about the spatial adoption in social networks.
During its entire life cycle from 2002 to 2012, iWiW reached up to 300 million
friendship ties of 3 million users. We find that the number of adopters as a
function of town population follows a scaling law that reveals a strongly
concentrated early adoption in large towns and a less concentrated late
adoption. We also discover a strengthening distance decay of spread over the
life-cycle indicating high fraction of distant diffusion in early stages but
the dominance of local diffusion in late stages. The spreading process is
modelled within the Bass diffusion framework that enables us to compare the
differential equation version with an agent-based version of the model run on
the empirical network. Although both models can capture the macro trend of
adoption, they have limited capacity to describe the observed trends of urban
scaling and distance decay. We find, however that incorporating adoption
thresholds, defined by the fraction of social connections that adopt a
technology before the individual adopts, improves the network model fit to the
urban scaling of early adopters. Controlling for the threshold distribution
enables us to eliminate the bias induced by local network structure on
predicting local adoption peaks. Finally, we show that geographical features
such as distance from the innovation origin and town size influence prediction
of adoption peak at local scales.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figures, 4 table
Investigating Media Influence on Language Change in Low-Level Sociolinguistic Variables
This survey investigates the contentious issue of media influence on language change in variationist sociolinguistics, focusing on low-level variables – a distinction created to partition phonological and morphosyntactic variables into a category that emphasizes their deep level in the linguistic system. Works by influential researchers and well-respected names in the field are put in dialogue to determine what evidence for and against media influence is compelling and where gaps exist, incorporating work on global linguistic variants and phonological variant diffusion in places like Glasgow per Jane-Stuart Smith’s controversial study. This discussion draws conclusions when possible, and ultimately comments on the limitations of existing frameworks in the task of assessing the influence of rapidly evolving media types on language change in the 21st century
- …