Identifying Influential and Susceptible Members of Social Networks

Abstract

Who Influences Who? A goal in social science is how to assess people's influence over one. Aral and Walker (p. 337 , published online 21 June) describe a generalized method for identifying influential and susceptible members of social networks based on large-scale in vivo randomized experimentation. The method was used to estimate peer effects in consumer demand for a commercial Facebook application in a representative sample of 12 million Facebook users. Older users were more influential than younger users, women were more influential over men than men over women, and married individuals were the least susceptible to influence in the decision to adopt the product studied.