Wealth and status: Analyzing the perceived attractiveness of 2010 FIFA world cup players

This paper analyzes the supply of status using data on the attractiveness ratings for the World Cup 2010 athletes from the social networking website BeautifulPeople.com. Treating the data as a team-player panel, the 32 country fixed effects are positively associated with GDP per capita. Furthermore, there is no obvious correlation between each country's GDP per capita and its FIFA rank, suggesting that income is related to these status fixed effects through a direct channel

Twitter in Congress: Outreach vs Transparency

The paper provides some support in favor of Twitter adoption being driven by outreach reasons, rather than the well-popularized transparency motive. Furthermore, outreach considerations factor into a Republican's perceived benefit more than a Democrat's

Twitter Adoption in Congress

We study the early adoption of Twitter in the 111th House of Representatives. Our main objective is to determine whether successes of past adopters have the tendency to speed up Twitter adoption, where past success is defined as the average followers per Tweet (i.e. "Twitter clout") among all prior adopters. The data suggests that accelerated adoption can be associated with favorable past outcomes: increasing the average number of followers per Tweet among past adopters by a standard deviation (of 8 followers per Tweet) accelerates the adoption time by about 112 days. This acceleration effect is weaker for those who already have adopted Facebook and those who have access to information about a large number of past adopters. We later find a strong relationship between an adopter's realized followers per Tweet, and the success of adopters preceding him/her. Thus, there may exist benefits associated with adopting Twitter based on past successes of others

Twitter Adoption in Congress: Who Tweets First?

Our general objective is to characterize the recent and well publicized diffusion of Twitter among politicians in the United States 111th House of Representatives. Ultimately, Barack Obama, Facebook and peers matter when it comes to the propensity and speed of Twitter adoption. A basic analysis of the distribution of first Tweets over time reveals clustering around the President's inauguration; which holds regardless whether the adopter is Democratic or Republican, or an incumbent or newcomer. After we characterize which representatives are most likely to adopt Twitter, we confirm the widespread belief that Facebook and Twitter are indeed complementary technology. Given their perceived desire for accessible government, a surprising result is that Republicans are more likely to adopt Twitter than Democrats. Finally, using the exact dates of each adopter's first Tweet, we demonstrate that the diffusion of Twitter is faster for those representatives with a larger number of peers already using the technology, where peers are defined by two social networks: (1) Politicians representing the same state; and (2) politicians belonging to the same committees; especially so for those in committee networks. We later argue that this observed behavior can be rationalized by social learning. To complete our characterization of Twitter use in congress, we demonstrate the existence of opportunity costs, using ex post usage statistics for each adopter; participation is constrained by how many bills a representative has initiated, as well as whether he/she already participates in Facebook

Twitter Adoption in Congress

We study the early adoption of Twitter in the 111th House of Representatives. Our main objective is to determine whether successes of past adopters have the tendency to speed up Twitter adoption, where past success is defined as the average followers per Tweet - a common measure of "Twitter success" - among all prior adopters. The data suggests that accelerated adoption can be associated with favorable past outcomes: increasing the average number of followers per Tweet among past adopters by a standard deviation (of 8 followers per Tweet) accelerates the adoption time by about 112 days. This acceleration effect is weaker for those who already have adopted Facebook and those who have access to information about a large number of past adopters. We later find a positive relationship between an adopter's realized followers per Tweet and the success of adopters preceding him/her. Thus, there may exist benefits associated with adopting Twitter based on past successes of others. In general, the patterns we find are consistent with predictions generated by a simple model of adoption delay with learning

Wealth and Status: Analyzing the Perceived Attractiveness of 2010 FIFA World Cup Players

Dating back to Veblen (1899), theoretical and empirical studies about conspicuous consumption have largely stipulated associations between social status and income. This paper focuses on the supply of status and tests the underlying assumption by using a data on the attractiveness ratings for the World Cup 2010 athletes from the social networking website BeautifulPeople.com. Treating the data as a team-player panel, we find that the 32 country fixed effects are positively associated with GDP per capita, even after controlling for the team's ex ante Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) rank, Gini coefficient, and number of internet users. Furthermore, there is no obvious correlation between each country's GDP per capita and its FIFA rank, which suggests that income is related to these "status" fixed effects through some direct channel. In other words, there is indeed a link between a country's social status and its economic development. We caution though that income is not an exclusive driver of status, as ability, age, game outcome and race also matter

Twitter in Congress: Outreach vs Transparency

The paper provides some support in favor of Twitter adoption being driven by outreach reasons, rather than the well-popularized transparency motive. Furthermore, outreach considerations factor into a Republican's perceived benefit more than a Democrat's

Twitter Adoption in Congress

We study the early adoption of Twitter in the 111th House of Representatives. Our main objective is to determine whether successes of past adopters have the tendency to speed up Twitter adoption, where past success is defined as the average followers per Tweet - a common measure of "Twitter success" - among all prior adopters. The data suggests that accelerated adoption can be associated with favorable past outcomes: increasing the average number of followers per Tweet among past adopters by a standard deviation (of 8 followers per Tweet) accelerates the adoption time by about 112 days. This acceleration effect is weaker for those who already have adopted Facebook and those who have access to information about a large number of past adopters. We later find a positive relationship between an adopter's realized followers per Tweet and the success of adopters preceding him/her. Thus, there may exist benefits associated with adopting Twitter based on past successes of others. In general, the patterns we find are consistent with predictions generated by a simple model of adoption delay with learning

Twitter Adoption in Congress: Who Tweets First?

Our general objective is to characterize the recent and well publicized diffusion of Twitter among politicians in the United States 111th House of Representatives. Ultimately, Barrack Obama, Facebook and peers matter when it comes to the propensity and speed of Twitter adoption. A basic analysis of the distribution of first Tweets over time reveals clustering around the President's inauguration; which holds regardless whether the adopter is Democratic or Republican, or an incumbent or newcomer. After we characterize which representatives are most likely to adopt Twitter, we confirm the widespread belief that Facebook and Twitter are indeed complementary technology. Given their perceived desire for accessible government, a surprising result is that Republicans are more likely to adopt Twitter than Democrats. Finally, using the exact dates of each adopter's first Tweet, we demonstrate that the diffusion of Twitter is faster for those representatives with a larger number of peers already using the technology, where peers are defined by two social networks: (1) Politicians representing the same state; and (2) politicians belonging to the same committees; especially so for those in committee networks. This observed behavior can be rationalized by social learning, as the instances in which the peer effects are important correspond to the cases in which social learning is relevant