Three essays on social influence in social advertising using a large-scale randomized field experiment

In this thesis, I examine the causal relationships among products, social influence and network-embedded human behaviors, in the context of social advertising. Social advertising places social cues (e.g., likes) in ads, utilizing the power of social influence (the effects of social cues in ads) to encourage ad engagement. I collaborate with a social networking app for a large-scale randomized field experiment on its social ads. In the experiment, the presence and the number of social cues were randomly assigned among 57 million ad-user pairs (more than 37 million subjects and across 71 products in 25 product categories). Integrating the experimental evidence and the data of individuals, products, ads and network structures, my studies address the incentives, magnitude, contagion patterns and viral factors (i.e., characteristics of products, behaviors and individuals) of social influence in social advertising and product adoptions.

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Huang, Shan, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Erik Brynjolfsson.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/118013

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/118013