It's hard to attend a serious academic conference these days and not find somebody attempting to understand better whether how (in a causal way) people participating in social networks influence others. For instance, if you post a positive Facebook update about a product or service, does that cause your friends to adopt it? The key challenge is always separating out the effects of influence versus that of homophily. In the latter people adopt similar things because they have similar preferences, and not necessarily because of the social network based influence.
Check out this interesting study that attempts to isolate these effects in a social contagion game.
Do you think this study suffers from a similar issue?
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