Diffusion of adoptions on dynamic social networks: A case study of a real-world community of consumers

Marketers can track as to when customers buy products or subscribe services, but it is more difficult to assess the social influence on customers before their decisions, or when and how they pass recommendations on to other customers favoring the diffusion of a product. Some previous seminal studies have addressed social contagion using network theory to manage relational data on diffusion of innovation research. Networks have enabled addressing issues such as heterogeneities in human relations, the role of opinion leaders and regular consumers in the diffusion of innovations, in finding out how to encourage the right people to get the word out, and whether there is a complementary effect between social influence and traditional marketing. The dataset consists of records of telephone calls between community members in a small town. The raw data are lists of the total phone calls between vertices in a given month for a span of 10 years.