The Emergence of Opinion Leaders in a Networked Online Community: A Dyadic Model with Time Dynamics and a Heuristic for Fast Estimation

• Autores: Lu Yingda, Kinshuk Jerath, Param Vir Singh
• Localización: Management science: journal of the Institute for operations research and the management sciences, ISSN 0025-1909, Vol. 59, Nº. 8, 2013, págs. 1783-1799
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • We study the drivers of the emergence of opinion leaders in a networked community where users establish links to others, indicating their �trust� for the link receiver's opinion. This leads to the formation of a network, with high in-degree individuals being the opinion leaders. We use a dyad-level proportional hazard model with time-varying covariates to model the growth of this network. To estimate our model, we use Weighted Exogenous Sampling with Bayesian Inference, a methodology that we develop for fast estimation of dyadic models on large network data sets. We find that, in the Epinions network, both the widely studied �preferential attachment� effect based on the existing number of inlinks (i.e., a network-based property of a node) and the number and quality of reviews written (i.e., an intrinsic property of a node) are significant drivers of new incoming trust links to a reviewer (i.e., inlinks to a node). Interestingly, we find that time is an important moderator of these effects�intrinsic node characteristics are a stronger short-term driver of additional inlinks, whereas the preferential attachment effect has a smaller impact but it persists for a longer time. Our novel insights have important managerial implications for the design of online review communities.