Product Adoption Networks and Their Growth in a Large Mobile Phone Network

—To understand the diffusive spreading of a product in a telecom network, whether the product is a service, handset, or subscription, it can be very useful to study the structure of the underlying social network. By combining mobile traffic data and product adoption history from one of Telenor’s markets, we can define and measure an adoption network—roughly, the social network of adopters. By studying the time evolution of adoption networks, we can observe how different products diffuses through the network, and measure potential social influence. This paper presents an empirical and comparative study of three adoption networks evolving over time in a large telecom network. We believe that the strongest spreading of adoption takes place in the dense core of the underlying network, and gives rise to a dominant largest connected component (LCC) in the adoption network, which we call “the social network monster”. We believe that the size of the monster is a good indicator for wh...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ASUNAM
• Authors: Pal Roe Sundsoy, Johannes Bjelland, Geoffrey Canright, Kenth Engø-Monsen, Rich Ling
• Keywords: Adoption Networks, ASUNAM 2010, Social Network, Social Network Monsters, Social Networks