2016/01/23 by Qiwei Han, Han, Qiwei, Pedro Ferreira +3
Business, Management and Accounting · Decision Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Digital Platforms and Economics #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Innovation Diffusion and Forecasting #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1601.06292
openalex publication_date 2016/01/23 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Understanding adoption patterns of smartphones is of vital importance to telecommunication managers in today's highly dynamic mobile markets. In this paper, we leverage the network structure and specific position of each individual in the social network to account for and measure the potential heterogeneous role of peer influence in the adoption of the iPhone 3G. We introduce the idea of core/periphery as a meso-level organizational principle to study the social network, which complements the use of centrality measures derived from either global network properties (macro-level) or from each individual's local social neighbourhood (micro-level). Using millions of call detailed records from a mobile network operator in one country for a period of eleven months, we identify overlapping social communities as well as core and periphery individuals in the network. Our empirical analysis shows that core users exert more influence on periphery users than vice versa. Our findings provide important insights to help identify influential members in the social network, which is potentially useful to design optimal targeting strategies to improve current network-based marketing practices.