What Will Be Popular Next? Predicting Hotspots in Two-Mode Social Networks
Authors: Li, Zhepeng (Lionel); Ge, Yong; Bai, Xue
Journal: MIS Quarterly (2021)
<jats:p>In social networks, social foci are physical or virtual entities around which social individuals organize joint activities, for example, places and products (physical form) or opinions and services (virtual form). Forecasting which social foci will diffuse to more social individuals is important for managerial functions such as marketing and public management operations. In terms of diffusive social adoptions, prior studies on user adoptive behavior in social networks have focused on single-item adoption in homogeneous networks. We advance this body of research by modeling scenarios with multi-item adoption and learning the relative propagation of social foci in concurrent social diffusions for online social networking platforms. In particular, we distinguish two types of social nodes in our two-mode social network model: social foci and social actors. Based on social network theories, we identify and operationalize factors that drive social adoption within the two-mode social network. We also capture the interdependencies between social actors and social foci using a bilateral recursive process—specifically, a mutual reinforcement process that converges to an analytical f…