Asymmetric Peer Influence in Smartphone Adoption in a Large Mobile Network

TL;DR

This study analyzes how social network structure influences smartphone adoption, revealing that core users significantly impact periphery users, offering insights for targeted marketing strategies.

Contribution

It introduces the core/periphery concept to measure heterogeneous peer influence in social networks for smartphone adoption.

Findings

Core users exert more influence on periphery users.

Overlapping social communities identified in the network.

Empirical analysis based on call records from a large mobile operator.

Abstract

Understanding adoption patterns of smartphones is of vital importance to telecommunication managers in today's highly dynamic mobile markets. In this paper, we leverage the network structure and specific position of each individual in the social network to account for and measure the potential heterogeneous role of peer influence in the adoption of the iPhone 3G. We introduce the idea of core/periphery as a meso-level organizational principle to study the social network, which complements the use of centrality measures derived from either global network properties (macro-level) or from each individual's local social neighbourhood (micro-level). Using millions of call detailed records from a mobile network operator in one country for a period of eleven months, we identify overlapping social communities as well as core and periphery individuals in the network. Our empirical analysis shows that core users exert more influence on periphery users than vice versa. Our findings provide important insights to help identify influential members in the social network, which is potentially useful to design optimal targeting strategies to improve current network-based marketing practices.