Sean Taylor (Facebook)

TUILES: Tuesday Informal Lunchtime Seminars Fall 2016

Tuesday, October 18th

KMC 8-170

Lunch will be available at 12:15 pm. The seminar begins at 12:30 pm.

"The Role of Sports in Social Network Formation"

Sean Taylor (Facebook)

Abstract: The collective experience of watching sports is a nearly universal part of human culture. Here we argue that the outcomes of sports events (specifically NFL and EPL football games) cause increased assortative mixing on sports affiliation but sometime disassortative mixing on other hompophilic attributes, such as educational attainment. We use the stochastic nature of game outcomes plus differences-in-differences estimation to show that a win causes a higher rate of Facebook friendship formation between fans with the same affiliation. We propose that the mechanism for the effect is basking in reflected glory (Cialdini et al. 1976), whereby the affiliation of fans of the winning team increases in salience after wins. Our result is consistent with a simple threshold model of friendship formation where surprise wins provide a random positive shocks to the salience of a homophilic attribute. Such a model has a somewhat non-obvious implication: surprise wins should increase diversity of ties formed on other homophilic dimensions (e.g. politics, education level, etc.) due to substitution effects. We evaluate the evidence for these substitution effects on the assortative mixing on number of mutual friends, political preferences, and educational attainment. Our work contributes to the literature on causal inference in network formation and shows that sports play a role in changing the diversity of human social networks.

Bio: Sean J. Taylor is a computational social scientist on Facebook’s Data Science team. Prior to Facebook, he earned his PhD in Information Systems from NYU’s Stern School of Business. He specializes in using machine learning methods and randomized experiments for measurement, prediction, and policy decisions. Sean’s research ranges from studying online social influence, viral marketing, and social networks to measuring how sports fans behave and the impact of data science on decision making in organizations. He is also an avid engineer who enjoys putting academic research into practice by building tools and services like new kinds of prediction markets and automated forecasting systems.