A Friend Like Me: Modeling Network Formation in a Location-Based Social Network

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Lee, Gene Moo; Qiu, Liangfei; Whinston, Andrew B.
• 署名单位: University of Texas System; University of Texas Arlington; State University System of Florida; University of Florida; University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0742-1222
• DOI: 10.1080/07421222.2016.1267523
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 1008-1033
• 关键词: instrumental variables; information-technology; identification; recommendation; contagion; diffusion; MARKETS; demand

摘要

This article studies the strategic network formation in a location-based social network. We build an empirical model of social link creation that incorporates individual characteristics and pairwise user similarities. Specifically, we define four user proximity measures from biography, geography, mobility, and short messages. To construct proximity from unstructured text information, we build topic models using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Using Gowalla data with 385,306 users, 3 million locations, and 35 million check-in records, we empirically estimate the model to find evidence on the homophily effect on network formation. To cope with possible endogeneity issues, we use exogenous weather shocks as our instrumental variables and find the empirical results are robust: network formation decisions are significantly affected by our proximity measures.