Related papers: Regression-based Negative Control of Homophily in …
We investigate critical behaviors of a social contagion model on weighted networks. An edge-weight compartmental approach is applied to analyze the weighted social contagion on strongly heterogenous networks with skewed degree and weight…
It is commonly accepted that some phenomena are social: for example, individuals' smoking habits often correlate with those of their peers. Such correlations can have a variety of explanations, such as direct contagion or shared…
We investigate peer role model influence on successful graduation from Therapeutic Communities (TCs) for substance abuse and criminal behavior. We use data from 3 TCs that kept records of exchanges of affirmations among residents and their…
People's perceptions about the size of minority groups in social networks can be biased, often showing systematic over- or underestimation. These social perception biases are often attributed to biased cognitive or motivational processes.…
A social (sexual) network is modeled by an extension of the configuration model to the situation where edges have weights, e.g. reflecting the number of sex-contacts between the individuals. An epidemic model is defined on the network such…
We study treatment effect modifiers for causal analysis in a social network, where neighbors' characteristics or network structure may affect the outcome of a unit, and the goal is to identify sub-populations with varying treatment effects…
I study peer effects that arise from irreversible decisions in the absence of a standard social equilibrium. I model a latent sequence of decisions in continuous time and obtain a closed-form expression for the likelihood, which allows to…
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:…
Causal inference in networks should account for interference, which occurs when a unit's outcome is influenced by treatments or outcomes of peers. Heterogeneous peer influence (HPI) occurs when a unit's outcome is influenced differently by…
In social science researches, causal inference regarding peer effects often faces significant challenges due to homophily bias and contextual confounding. For example, unmeasured health conditions (e.g., influenza) and psychological states…
Modifiable health behaviors, a leading cause of illness and death in many countries, are often driven by individual beliefs and sentiments about health and disease. Individual behaviors affecting health outcomes are increasingly modulated…
Estimating causal effects is crucial for decision-makers in many applications, but it is particularly challenging with observational network data due to peer interactions. Many algorithms have been proposed to estimate causal effects…
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 develop a method to decompose causal effects on a social network into an indirect effect mediated by the network, and a direct effect independent of the social network. To handle the complexity of network structures, we assume that…
Homophily -- the tendency of individuals to interact with similar others -- shapes how networks form and function. Yet existing approaches typically collapse homophily to a single scale, either one parameter for the whole network or one per…
Although social and biomedical scientists have long been interested in the process through which ideas and behaviors diffuse, the identification of causal diffusion effects, also known as peer and contagion effects, remains challenging.…
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…
Heterogeneity is a hallmark of complex diseases. Regression-based heterogeneity analysis, which is directly concerned with outcome-feature relationships, has led to a deeper understanding of disease biology. Such an analysis identifies the…
The importance of peer influence on consumer actions plays a vital role in marketing efforts. However, peer influence effects are often confounded with latent homophily, which are unobserved commonalities that drive friendship.…
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…