A talk of interest to the COR community…

“Network Hubs Cease to be Influential in the Presence of Low Levels of
Advertising”

Speaker: Gabriel Rossman, UCLA
Date: May 10, 2019
Time: 10:30-12:00noon
Venue: SB1 5200 (Porter Colloquium Room)

Abstract:
The “influentials” or “opinion leadership” hypothesis argues that social network hubs have disproportionate importance to how new ideas and behaviors spread. Previous research affirming this hypothesis has assumed that all learning occurs through the network, but we conduct a computational experiment in which we allow learning both through the network and from external sources of information (e.g., advertising). We replicate opinion leadership, but only in the region of parameter space where external influence is absent. When the model allows even trivial levels of external influence, hubs are no more important to diffusion than nodes chosen at random.