A Friend Like Me: Modeling Network Formation in a Location-Based Social Network. Issue 4 (1st October 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Lee, Gene Moo; Qiu, Liangfei; Whinston, Andrew B.
• Is Part Of: Journal of management information systems. Volume 33:Issue 4(2016)
• Page Start: 1008
• Page End: 1033
• Publication Date: 2016-10-01
• Subjects: homophily -- location-based service -- network formation -- social networks -- topic modeling -- user proximity; Management information systems -- Periodicals; Management information systems; Periodicals; 658.4038011
• DOI: 10.1080/07421222.2016.1267523
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0742-1222

Abstract

Abstract: This article studies the strategic network formation in a location-based social network. We build an empirical model of social link creation that incorporates individual characteristics and pairwise user similarities. Specifically, we define four user proximity measures from biography, geography, mobility, and short messages. To construct proximity from unstructured text information, we build topic models using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Using Gowalla data with 385, 306 users, 3 million locations, and 35 million check-in records, we empirically estimate the model to find evidence on the homophily effect on network formation. To cope with possible endogeneity issues, we use exogenous weather shocks as our instrumental variables and find the empirical results are robust: network formation decisions are significantly affected by our proximity measures.