Trust facilitates cooperation and supports positive outcomes in social groups, including member satisfaction, information sharing, and task performance. Extensive prior research has examined individuals’ general propensity to trust, as well as the factors…

Most models of social contagion take peer exposure to be a corollary of adoption, yet in many settings, the visibility of one's adoption behavior happens through a separate decision process. In online systems, product designers can define how peer exposure…

When people share updates with their friends on Facebook they have varying expectations for the feedback they will receive. In this study, we quantitatively examine the factors contributing to feedback expectations and the potential outcomes of expectation…

A drawback with A/B testing is that it is poorly suited for experiments involving social interference, when the treatment of individuals spills over to neighboring individuals along an underlying social network. In this work, we propose a novel methodology…

Giving people the power to build community is central to Facebook’s mission. Technically, searching for communities poses very different challenges compared to the standard IR problems.

To understand the top practical challenges in running OCEs at scale, representatives with experience in large-scale experimentation from thirteen different organizations (Airbnb, Amazon, Booking.com, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Lyft, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter…

Though social network site use is often treated as a monolithic activity, in which all time is equally “social” and its impact the same for all users, we examine how Facebook affects social capital depending upon: (1) types of site activities, contrasting…

Social networks can shape many aspects of social and economic activity: migration and trade, job-seeking, innovation, consumer preferences and sentiment, public health, social mobility, and more. In turn, social networks themselves are associated with geographic…

As a class, online groups are popular, but many die before they become successful. This research traced the fate of 472,231 new online groups. By the end of a 3-month observation period, 57% of the gr...

From the donut effect to ‘cockroaching’, the Field Guide to Urban Plazas looks at how people behave in public space