Hi all,
This week at the Applied Statistics workshop we will be welcoming Dean Eckles, an
Assistant Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He will be
presenting work entitled "Estimating Peer Effects in Networks with Peer Encouragement
Designs." Please find the abstract below and on the website. The paper can be found
at:
http://www.pnas.org/content/113/27/7316.abstract
We will meet in CGIS Knafel Room 354 at noon and lunch will be provided.
Best,
Pam
Title: Estimating Peer Effects in Networks with Peer Encouragement Designs
(Dean Eckles, René Kizilcec, Eytan Bakshy)
Abstract: Peer effects, in which the behavior of an individual is affected by the behavior
of their peers, are central to social science. Because peer effects are often confounded
with homophily and common external causes, recent work has used randomized experiments to
estimate effects of specific peer behaviors. These experiments have often relied on the
experimenter being able to randomly modulate mechanisms by which peer behavior is
transmitted to a focal individual. We describe experimental designs that instead randomly
assign individuals’ peers to encouragements to behaviors that directly affect those
individuals. We illustrate this method with a large peer encouragement design on Facebook
for estimating the effects of receiving feedback from peers on posts shared by focal
individuals. We find evidence for substantial effects of receiving marginal feedback on
multiple behaviors, including giving feedback to others and continued posting. These
findings provide experimental evidence for the role of behaviors directed at specific
individuals in the adoption and continued use of communication technologies. In
comparison, observational estimates differ substantially, both underestimating and
overestimating effects, suggesting that researchers and policy makers should be cautious
in relying on them. This provides evidence about the role of directed behaviors in the
adoption and continued use of broadcast functionality.