Acquisition and retention · Randomized field experiment in a social network
Do Your Online Friends Make You Pay? A Randomized Field Experiment on Peer Influence in Online Social Networks
Bapna, R., & Umyarov, A. (2015). Management Science, 61(8), 1902–1920.
Plain-English take
An adopting friend increased the odds of buying the paid service by more than 60% in the study. For your marketing: If paid adoption is socially visible in your product, measure peer exposure as a possible conversion mechanism.
How much weight to give this
4.0/5 Useful evidence with meaningful caveats
The 1–5 evidence-check score is a practical reading aid, not a formal peer review or a probability that a conclusion is true. It combines design strength (2 points), sample reporting (1), comparison/control clarity (1), and how much of the paper could be checked (1). Access affects how confidently this directory can assess a study, not the study's underlying quality. Blinding is reported separately because it is not relevant to every design.
Random assignment provides a strong comparison for effects in the tested setting.
A usable sample size is not stated in the profile's accessible source.
Randomized comparison; confirm the control condition and analysis in the paper.
This profile could be checked against an abstract or metadata, not the full paper.
Double-blind? Blinding is not reported in the source reviewed; that does not establish whether blinding was or was not used.
Research question
What the authors investigated
Does a friend's adoption of a paid service causally affect another user's decision to pay?
Design
Randomized field experiment that exogenously induced adoption of a paid service among users in a large online social network; results were checked with several statistical approaches.
Sample and setting
The general population of users on a large social network with a freemium service; the publisher abstract does not state the sample size.
Reported result
What the study found
An adopting friend increased the odds of buying the paid service by more than 60% in the study. Relative influence was stronger for users with fewer friends.
This is a paraphrase of the source. Check the original paper for definitions, estimates, statistical uncertainty and analysis details.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
One freemium social network and paid feature. Network structure and visible peer adoption are central to the mechanism and may be absent in many SaaS products.
Possible founder application
If paid adoption is socially visible in your product, measure peer exposure as a possible conversion mechanism. Avoid assuming that adding a referral prompt reproduces the network effect studied here.
Evidence access
Publisher abstract; full text may require access
INFORMS publisher abstract retrieved with Firecrawl; detailed sample and full methods were not available in the abstract.
If only an abstract or metadata was available, the profile is limited to claims supported there. A paper's paywall does not change its evidentiary status, but it limits what we can substantiate from accessible text.