Identifying the Casual Impact of Network Structure: A Randomized Experiment on Twitter

SPRING 2015 RESEARCH INCUBATION AWARDEE 

Dylan Walker (Information Systems, Questrom School of Business)

Our day-to-day activities have become increasingly embedded in the digital realm, with online social networks spreading information between individuals at a massive scale, surpassing geographic constraints and social boundaries. While the digitization of our interactions has unquestionable relevance to social, economic and behavioral outcomes at the individual and population-level, the dynamics of how these social and information networks evolve, and in particular the dependence of these dynamics on popularity, are still not well understood.

To study this, we are conducting an in vivo large-scale randomized controlled trial to uncover the causal impact of population-level signals on social network evolution and information spreading behavior.

This work is funded by a Hariri Research Award made in June 2015.