Chander Velu

Homophily and the Speed of Social Mobilization: The Effect of Acquired and Ascribed Traits

Large-scale mobilization of individuals across social networks is becoming increasingly prevalent in society. However, little is known about what affects the speed of social mobilization. Here we use a framed field experiment to identify and measure properties of individuals and their relationships that predict mobilization speed. We ran a global social mobilization contest and recorded personal traits of the participants and those they recruited. We studied the effects of ascribed traits (gender, age) and acquired traits (geography, and information source) on the speed of mobilization. We found that homophily, a preference for interacting with other individuals with similar traits, had a mixed role in social mobilization. Homophily was present for acquired traits, in which mobilization speed was faster when the recuiter and recruit had the same trait compared to different traits. In contrast, we did not find support for homophily for the ascribed traits. Instead, those traits had other, non-homophily effects: Females mobilized other females faster than males mobilized other males. Younger recruiters mobilized others faster, and older recruits mobilized slower. Recruits also mobilized faster when they first heard about the contest directly from the contest organization, and decreased in speed when hearing from less personal source types (e.g. family vs. media). These findings show that social mobilization includes dynamics that are unlike other, more passive forms of social activity propagation. These findings suggest relevant factors for engineering social mobilization tasks for increased speed.

Divine Competition: Religious Organisations and Service Provision in India

This paper examines religious and non-religious service provision by religious organisations in India. We present a stylized Hotelling-style model in which two religious organisations differentiate hemselves on the strength of religious beliefs in order to compete in attracting adherents. We show in the model two central predictions: first,that the organisations will differentiate themselves on the strength of religious beliefs. Second, that in equilibrium, economic inequality makes the organisations increase their provision of non-religious services. To test this, we present unique primary survey dataon the economics of religion, collected by us between 2006 and 2010 from 568 Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh and Jain religious organisations spread across 7 Indian states. We use these data to demonstrate that the organisations have substantially increasedtheir provision of non-religious services. We also provide quantitative evidence based oneconometric testing to highlight that religious organisations are differenting themselves on the strength of religious beliefs with respect to other organisations, and are also providing higher education and health services as economic inequality increases in India.

Divine Innovation: Religion and Service Provision by Religious Organizations in India

This paper examines innovations to religious and non-religious service provision by religious organizations in India. We present a stylized Hotelling-style model in which two religious organizations position themselves at opposite locations to differentiate themselves on the religious spectrum in order to compete to attract adherents. Moreover, the model predicts that economic inequality can make both organizations increase their provision of non-religious services to retain adherents. In order to test our propositions, we present unique primary survey data on the economics of religion that we have collected from 2006-2008 on 568 Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh and Jain religious organizations spread across seven Indian states. We use these data to provide qualitative and descriptive statistics from the survey that is consistent and provides initial support for our propositions. We show that these organizations have substantially increased their provision of religious and non-religious services, but that there are significant variations by religion. We also provide quantitative evidence based on econometric testing to highlight that Indian religious organizations are maximizing the differences in their ideology with respect to other organizations, and are also providing higher education and health services as economic inequality increases in India.

Returns-Based Beliefs and The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Returns-based beliefs provides an explanation for the anomaly between the theory and empirics for the one-shot and finitely-repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma games. Even in a fully specified game, there is strategic uncertainty as players attempt to coordinate their actions. Therefore players form subjective probabilities of the actions of their opponents. We provide a new method termed the ‘returns-based beliefs’ approach of forming subjective probabilities that is based upon the expected returns of a particular strategy, in proportion to the total expected returns of all strategies. This method can be applied even in the absence of knowledge of the players’ respective histories.

Effect of Media Usage Selection on Social Mobilization Speed: Facebook vs E-Mail

Social mobilization is a process that enlists a large number of people to achieve a goal within a limited time, especially through the use of social media. There is increasing interest in understanding the factors that affect the speed of social mobilization. Based on the Langley Knights competition data set, we analyzed the differences in mobilization speed between users of Facebook and e-mail. We include other factors that may influence mobilization speed (gender, age, timing, and homophily of information source) in our model as control variables in order to isolate the effect of such factors. We show that, in this experiment, although more people used e-mail to recruit, the mobilization speed of Facebook users was faster than that of those that used e-mail. We were also able to measure and show that the mobilization speed for Facebook users was on average seven times faster compared to e-mail before controlling for other factors. After controlling for other factors, we show that Facebook users were 1.84 times more likely to register compared to e-mail users in the next period if they have not done so at any point in time. This finding could provide useful insights for future social mobilization efforts.

Institutions and Collaborative Innovation

This paper explores the importance of developing institutions as a means to govern collaborative innovation among stakeholders such as individuals and firms. We argue that institutions are a key element in the creation of markets to enable and sustain collaborative innovation. Institutions can be both informal and formal. Informal institutions include conventions, moral rules and social norms whereby there is no external enforcer. Formal institutions need external enforcement by a third party. We use the prisoner’s dilemma game and the empirical results from it as an analogy to draw lessons about how institutions could be developed to enhance collaborative innovations. We use case vignettes to illustrate our findings. We draw implications for managers to shape the institutional structure for collaboration by demonstrating the importance of fairness, reciprocity, development of social capital and understanding demographic characteristics of the participants. In addition, we show when participants are less homogenous, a formal external agency is needed to encourage collaboration.

Measuring and Predicting Speed of Social Mobilization

Mobilization across social networks is becoming increasingly influential, but little is known about what traits of individuals and their relationships affect their speed of mobilization between them. We ran a global social mobilization contest and recorded personal traits of the participants and those they mobilized. We examined how those traits influenced the speed of mobilization. Individuals mobilized faster when they heard about the contest directly from the contest organization, and decreased in speed when hearing from less personal source types (e.g. family vs. media). Mobilization was faster when the mobilizer and the mobilized heard about the contest through the same source type, and slower when both individuals were in different countries. Females mobilized other females faster than males mobilized other males. Mobilization was faster with young recruiters and old recruits, and slower with old recruiters and young recruits. These findings suggest ways to optimize the speed of social mobilization. Alstott et al. Predictors of Social Mobilization Speed 2 | P a g e

Entrepreneurship and innovation in financial institutions

Entrepreneurs are a major source of innovation (Schumpeter 1942, Ahuja et al. 2008) and established firms are a major source of entrepreneurship (Hellmann 2007). For example, the semiconductor industry and the consulting industry have a history of new firms being set up by employees of established firms. Studies have shown that more than two-thirds of founders of startup firms have pursued opportunities from ideas that were encountered or closely related to their previous employmenty (Cooper 1985, Bhidé 1994). However, there is a lack of empirical evidence about the relationship between the innovativeness of firms and the type of entrepreneurial opportunities pursued by employees. This question is of great importance to the financial services industry, where some scholars and industry experts have argued that innovation was partly responsible for the credit crisis and the crash of 2008 (Boz and Mendoza 2010, FCIR 2011). To address this empirical lacuna, in this paper we examine the relationship between the type of entrepreneurial activity that employees set up and their relationship to firms’ innovation in the financial services industry. In this study, we examine the degree to which the new business set up by employees leaving the major US investment banks is ideas-driven. Ideas-driven implies that the new business being set up by the former employee was primarily because of a new business idea taken from the previous employer. A firm that is innovative could generate many new ideas that it is unable to implement fully, which results in employees taking some of these ideas and leaving the firm to set up new ventures based on these ideas. Therefore, we would observe that the new ventures set up by employees of such firms might be more ideas-driven. On the other hand, it might also be argued that an innovative firm that generates many new ideas creates an environment conducive to retaining its employees by providing them with many opportunities and hence discouraging employees to leave to set up new ventures. In this case we would observe that the new 2012 iStockphoto LP

A Reason for Unreason: Returns-Based Beliefs in Game Theory

Players cooperate in experiments more than game theory would predict. We introduce the ‘returns-based beliefs’ approach: the expected returns of a particular strategy in proportion to total expected returns of all strategies. Using a decision analytic solution concept, Luce’s (1959) probabilistic choice model, and ‘hyperpriors’ for ambiguity in players’ cooperability, our approach explains empirical observations in various classes of games including the Prisoner’s and Traveler’s Dilemmas. Testing the closeness of fit of our model on Selten and Chmura (2008) data for completely mixed 2 × 2 games shows that with loss aversion, returns-based beliefs explain the data better than other equilibrium concepts.

When to adopt a service innovation: Nash equilibria in a competitive diffusion framework

Abstract We study the optimal timing of adoption of a service innovation that a new entrant firm brings to a market populated by two incumbent firms. Our analysis is based on a model of competitive diffusion dynamics that extends the monopolistic Bass model to include customer churn processes, as well as a potential market expansion driven by the innovation. We obtain expressions for the time trajectories of the customer bases, i.e., the numbers of customers that use old and new service processes for the competing firms, as well as sharper, closed-form characterizations for the setting with a stable market and homogeneous imitation process. In modeling competitive dynamics we consider settings where incumbents anticipate a potential failure of the innovation. We use the trajectories for the customer bases to model an optimal adoption response problem faced by one of the incumbent firms when the adoption time for the other incumbent can be anticipated or is pre-announced, and analyze this problem in the absence of market expansion or intra-generational customer churn. Using the optimal response results, we provide the Nash equilibrium analysis of the adoption decisions by competing incumbent firms and derive sufficient conditions for the “now-now”, “now-never” and “never-never” adoption equilibria. We use the trading volume data from the foreign exchange markets to estimate the parameters of the competitive diffusion dynamics for our model and to conduct a numerical investigation of the impact of the uncertainty associated with the success of the innovation on the incumbents’ Nash equilibrium adoption times.