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Contribution Details

Type Conference or Workshop Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Published in Proceedings Yes
Title The death of a relationship
Organization Unit
Authors
  • A Ansari
  • O Koenigsberg
  • Florian Stahl
Presentation Type paper
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Page Range 1 - 2
Event Title INFORMS Marketing Science 2009
Event Type conference
Event Location Ann Arbor
Event Start Date June 4 - 2009
Event End Date June 6 - 2009
Abstract Text Users in online social networks ostensibly have relationships with a large number of other users. This has prompted many to comment that the nature of friendship in the online world is different from the offline world. However, even though a user may connect with many others, a majority of such connections become inactive after a period of time, and therefore, many relationships cease to exist. A challenge in modeling such connections is that death is unobserved, as the connection remains, but is not active. As a consequence, models that ignore the death of relationships overestimate the density of a network and can bias measures of user influence. We model interactivity among users in an online social network and explicitly account for unobserved relationship death via extensions of the well known Pareto-NBD and BG-NBD models to social network settings. We estimate our model on a network of musicians using hierarchical Bayesian methods and find that accounting for the death of relationships is beneficial for predicting future interactivity.
Official URL http://www.bus.umich.edu/mks2009/
Other Identification Number merlin-id:854
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