Measuring interpersonal influence

David Nickerson gave a wonderful talk at our quantitative political science seminar last week. He described three different experiments he did, and it was really cool. Here’s the paper, and here are Alex’s comments on it.

I’ve never really done an experiment. I like the idea but somehow I’ve never gotten organized to do one. I want to, though. I feel like an incomplete statistician as things currently stand.

1 thought on “Measuring interpersonal influence

  1. Fascinating paper and Alex's comments are good too.

    I wonder if some of the practical concerns of experiments aren't diminishing through randomized Internet field experiments. Consider a research that could be done with a social network like facebook. First, interaction and contact between the network is entirely controlled centrally–so manipulations can be administered easily and powerfully. Second, new features and announcements are perfect exogenous shocks. Third (but perhaps more problematically), they can attempt to create new networks.

    Thanks for the heads up!

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