Harvard Business School recently published a working paper titled Do Friends Influence Purchases in a Social Network.
And I read it, of course. So I’ll save you some time and give you a simple overview on what they learned, and what I learned from them.
- First, I had to get back to my Trigonometry and Calculus classes to get my head around all the equations they have in the document to define their findings. Very interesting. Very amazing. Very intelligent. And I am not pretending to really understand what all of it was. Ha.
- Second, the paper is a working paper, so a bit of duplicate content to get through. Unless they were just trying to really drive the point home.
- Third, I found it odd that a paper from 2009 would use data mined in 2004. Sure seems like behaviors could change over this 4+ year span.
Ok, so this is what I gained from it:
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