On Direct vs. Indirect Peer Influence in Large Social Networks

With the availability of large-scale network data, peer influence in social networks can be more rigorously examined and understood than before. Peer influence can arise from immediate neighbors in the network (formally defined as cohesion or direct ties with one-hop neighbors) and from indirect peers who share common neighbors (formally defined as structural equivalence or indirect ties with two-hop neighbors). While the literature examined the role of each peer influence (direct or indirect) separately, the study of both peer network effects acting simultaneously was ignored, largely because of methodological constraints. This paper attempts to fill this gap by evaluating the simultaneous effect of both direct and indirect peer influences in technology adoption in the context of caller ringback tone (CRBT) in a cellular telephone network, using data from 200 million calls by 1.4 million users. Given that such a large-scale network makes traditional social network analysis intractable, we extract many de...