Related papers: Homophily and Contagion Are Generically Confounded…

We address the problem of using observational data to estimate peer contagion effects, the influence of treatments applied to individuals in a network on the outcomes of their neighbors. A main challenge to such estimation is that homophily…

It the literature have been identified three social mechanisms explaining the similarity between people connected in the network of social relations homophily, confounding and social contagion. The article proposes a simple model for…

Current tests for contagion in social network studies are vulnerable to the confounding effects of latent homophily (i.e., ties form preferentially between individuals with similar hidden traits). We demonstrate a general method to lower…

A prominent threat to causal inference about peer effects over social networks is the presence of homophily bias, that is, social influence between friends and families is entangled with common characteristics or underlying similarities…

Homophily, the tendency of individuals to connect with others who share similar attributes, is a defining feature of social networks. Understanding how groups interact, both within and across, is crucial for uncovering the dynamics of…

We study how a behavior (an idea, buying a product, having a disease, adopting a cultural fad or a technology) spreads among agents in an a social network that exhibits segregation or homophily (the tendency of agents to associate with…

In recent years, social media has become a ubiquitous and integral part of social networking. One of the major attentions made by social researchers is the tendency of like-minded people to interact with one another in social groups, a…

We consider SIS contagion processes over networks where, a classical assumption is that individuals' decisions to adopt a contagion are based on their immediate neighbors. However, recent literature shows that some attributes are more…

We introduce a simple and extendable coevolution model for the analysis of longitudinal network and nodal attribute data. The model features parameters that describe three phenomena: homophily, contagion and autocorrelation of the network…

The adoption of individual behavioural patterns is largely determined by stimuli arriving from peers via social interactions or from external sources. Based on these influences, individuals are commonly assumed to follow simple or complex…

Contagion effect refers to the causal effect of peers' behavior on the outcome of an individual in social networks. Contagion can be confounded due to latent homophily which makes contagion effect estimation very hard: nodes in a homophilic…

Comprehensive and quantitative investigations of social theories and phenomena increasingly benefit from the vast breadth of data describing human social relations, which is now available within the realm of computational social science.…

Understanding the forces governing human behavior and social dynamics is a challenging problem. Individuals' decisions and actions are affected by interlaced factors, such as physical location, homophily, and social ties. In this paper, we…

An increasing number of scholars are using longitudinal social network data to try to obtain estimates of peer or social influence effects. These data may provide additional statistical leverage, but they can introduce new inferential…

Here, we review the research we have done on social contagion. We describe the methods we have employed (and the assumptions they have entailed) in order to examine several datasets with complementary strengths and weaknesses, including the…

Our societies are heterogeneous in many dimensions such as census, education, religion, ethnic and cultural composition. The links between individuals - e.g. by friendship, marriage or collaboration - are not evenly distributed, but rather…

This article investigates the impact of user homophily on the social process of information diffusion in online social media. Over several decades, social scientists have been interested in the idea that similarity breeds connection:…

We examine how three different communication processes operating through social networks are affected by homophily -- the tendency of individuals to associate with others similar to themselves. Homophily has no effect if messages are…

I reflect on the statistical methods of the Christakis-Fowler studies on network-based contagion of traits by checking the sensitivity of these kinds of results to various alternate specifications and generative mechanisms. Despite the…

Faced with uncertainty in decision making, individuals often turn to their social networks to inform their decisions. In consequence, these networks become central to how new products and behaviors spread. A key structural feature of…