The speed of innovation diffusion in social networks

Itai Arieli, Yakov Babichenko, Ron Peretz and H. Peyton Young

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: New ways of doing things often get started through the actions of a few innovators, then diffuse rapidly as more and more people come into contact with prior adopters in their social network. Much of the literature focuses on the speed of diffusion as a function of the network topology. In practice, the topology may not be known with any precision, and it is constantly in flux as links are formed and severed. Here, we establish an upper bound on the expected waiting time until a given proportion of the population has adopted that holds independently of the network structure. Kreindler and Young (2014) demonstrated such a bound for regular networks when agents choose between two options: the innovation and the status quo. Our bound holds for directed and undirected networks of arbitrary size and degree distribution, and for multiple competing innovations with different payoffs.

Keywords: Innovation diffusion; social networks; speed of equilibrium convergence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2020-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic, nep-net, nep-pay, nep-soc, nep-tid and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Published in Econometrica, 1, March, 2020, 88(2), pp. 569 - 594. ISSN: 0012-9682

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/102538/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:102538

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().