A Coevolution Model of Network Structure and User Behavior: The Case of Content Generation in Online Social Networks

Abstract

With the rapid growth of online social network sites (SNSs), it has become imperative for platform owners and online marketers to quantify what factors drive content production on these platforms. Previous research identified challenges in modeling these factors statistically using observational data, where the key difficulty is the inability of conventional methods to disentangle the effects of network formation and network influence on content generation from the subsequent feedback effect of newly generated content on network structure. In this paper, we adopt and enhance an actor-oriented continuous-time statistical model that enables the joint estimation of the coevolution of the users’ social network structure and of the amount of content they produce, using a Markov chain Monte Carlo–based simulation approach. Specifically, we offer a method to analyze nonstationary and continuous-time behavioral data, typically recorded in social media ecosystems, in the presence of network effects and other observable and unobservable user-specific covariates. The proposed method can help disentangle network effects of interest from feedback effects on the network. We apply our model to social network and public posting data over six months to find that (1) users tend to connect with others that have similar posting behavior; (2) however, after doing so, these users tend to diverge in their posting behavior, and (3) peer influence effects are sensitive to the strength of the posting behavior. More broadly, the proposed method provides researchers and practitioners with a statistically rigorous approach to analyze network effects in observational data. Our results lead to insights and recommendations for SNS platform owners on how to sustain an active and viable community. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2018.0790 .