Abstract
There are many studies in the marketing and diffusion literature of the conditions in which social contagion affects adoption processes. Yet most of these studies assume that social interactions do not change over time, even though actors in social networks exhibit different likelihoods of being influenced across the diffusion period. Rooted in physics and epidemiology theories, this study proposes a Susceptible Infectious Susceptible (SIS) model to assess the role of social contagion in adoption processes, which takes changes in social dynamics over time into account. To study the adoption over a span of ten years, the authors used detailed data sets from a community of consumers and determined the importance of social contagion, as well as how the interplay of social and non-social influences from outside the community drives adoption processes. Although social contagion matters for diffusion, it is less relevant in shaping adoption when the study also includes social dynamics among members of the community. This finding is relevant for managers and entrepreneurs who trust in word-of-mouth marketing campaigns whose effect may be overestimated if marketers fail to acknowledge variations in social interactions.
Highlights
Social network theory holds great importance for understanding social influences
In our empirical application we found that social contagion is approximately two and a half times stronger than non-social influence, b W
Our research goal was to contribute to a better understanding of how and to what extent social contagion drives the adoption of a new product
Summary
Social network theory holds great importance for understanding social influences. Ideas, information, trends, opinions, adoptions of new technologies, fads, and many other human activities spread among individuals through social interactions [1, 2], which makes seeking to understand how social influence works and the extent to which it affects adoption, highly relevant. Researchers must identify and follow up on users of the new product or innovation over time, because individuals might adopt or reject the innovation at different times They must account for variations in social relations among the community of customers over time, since social interactions are inherently unstable and change frequently. Concerning the studies reported in the marketing and diffusion of innovation literature, extant models, probably due to a lack of information, account for only the variation in adopters over time, using a single social network across time The central research question addressed in this paper is to understand how social dynamic in evolving networks affect the weight of social contagion in the process of adoption of new products
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