499 research outputs found
Co-experience Network Dynamics: Lessons from the Dance Floor.
Experience and socialization are key factors in determining customer commitment and renewal decisions in the service sector. To analyse the combined effect of experience and socialization, in this paper we introduce the concept of co-experience networks. A new methodological approach, originally applied in the field of social ethology, is devised to study reality-mined co-experience networks. By analysing a network of health club members over four years, we find that long-experienced clients have a lower chance to renew their contracts. On the other hand, central members in the co-experience network are stable and tend to renew their memberships. Further, since the members of the same reference group align their levels of commitment, renewal decisions are clustered in a small-world network. These findings contribute to our understanding of social dynamics and localized conformity in customer decision-making that can be used to plan marketing strategies to improve customer retention.
Threshold model of cascades in temporal networks
Threshold models try to explain the consequences of social influence like the
spread of fads and opinions. Along with models of epidemics, they constitute a
major theoretical framework of social spreading processes. In threshold models
on static networks, an individual changes her state if a certain fraction of
her neighbors has done the same. When there are strong correlations in the
temporal aspects of contact patterns, it is useful to represent the system as a
temporal network. In such a system, not only contacts but also the time of the
contacts are represented explicitly. There is a consensus that bursty temporal
patterns slow down disease spreading. However, as we will see, this is not a
universal truth for threshold models. In this work, we propose an extension of
Watts' classic threshold model to temporal networks. We do this by assuming
that an agent is influenced by contacts which lie a certain time into the past.
I.e., the individuals are affected by contacts within a time window. In
addition to thresholds as the fraction of contacts, we also investigate the
number of contacts within the time window as a basis for influence. To
elucidate the model's behavior, we run the model on real and randomized
empirical contact datasets.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, 2 table
Studying Diffusion of Viral Content at Dyadic Level
Diffusion of information and viral content, social contagion and influence
are still topics of broad evaluation. As theory explaining the role of
influentials moves slightly to reduce their importance in the propagation of
viral content, authors of the following paper have studied the information
epidemic in a social networking platform in order to confirm recent theoretical
findings in this area. While most of related experiments focus on the level of
individuals, the elementary entities of the following analysis are dyads. The
authors study behavioral motifs that are possible to observe at the dyadic
level. The study shows significant differences between dyads that are more vs
less engaged in the diffusion process. Dyads that fuel the diffusion proccess
are characterized by stronger relationships (higher activity, more common
friends), more active and networked receiving party (higher centrality
measures), and higher authority centrality of person sending a viral message.Comment: ASONAM 2012, The 2012 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances
in Social Networks Analysis and Mining. IEEE Computer Society, pp. 1291-129
The Multidimensional Study of Viral Campaigns as Branching Processes
Viral campaigns on the Internet may follow variety of models, depending on
the content, incentives, personal attitudes of sender and recipient to the
content and other factors. Due to the fact that the knowledge of the campaign
specifics is essential for the campaign managers, researchers are constantly
evaluating models and real-world data. The goal of this article is to present
the new knowledge obtained from studying two viral campaigns that took place in
a virtual world which followed the branching process. The results show that it
is possible to reduce the time needed to estimate the model parameters of the
campaign and, moreover, some important aspects of time-generations relationship
are presented.Comment: In proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Social
Informatics, SocInfo 201
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