Speakers

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  Sagit Bar-Gill

  
  

  Did you Know you are a Micro-Influencer? The Impact of Influence Awareness on Online Content Consumption

   

  In recent years, micro-influencers have become an integral part of social media marketing strategies harnessing their local influence to drive brand outcomes. In this study, we posit that small-scale influencers’ awareness of their influencer status may be enhanced by targeted messaging, such that perceived influence affects online activity. We study the impact of perceived influence and its interaction with actual social media influence on news exploration and consumption in an online experiment setting. We find that enhancing individuals’ awareness of their social media micro-influence increases exploration intensity and content consumption. This effect is largely driven by individuals with relatively high influence levels. The results suggest that the micro-influencer status is, at least partly, subjective and manipulable, and will inform the design of digital content platforms, as well as influencer-based marketing strategies.

   

  Sagit Bar-Gill is an assistant professor of Technology Management and Information Systems at the Coller School of Management in Tel Aviv University, and a Digital Fellow at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy.

  
  Her research studies the economics of online markets, and the impacts of digitization on firms and consumers, using online experiments, causal inference methods, and data science. Her work has been published in top journals, including Management Science, Management of Information Systems Quarterly, and Journal of the Association of Information Systems.

  
  Sagit holds a PhD and MA in economics, and a BSc in mathematics from Tel Aviv University.

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  Ana-Andreea Stoica

  
  

  Ana-Andreea Stoica is a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Her work focuses on mathematical models, data analysis, and inequality in social networks. From recommendation algorithms to the way information spreads in networks, Ana is particularly interested in studying the effect of algorithms on people's sense of community and access to information and opportunities. She strives to integrate tools from mathematical models—from graph theory to opinion dynamics—with sociology to gain a deeper understanding of the ethics and implications of technology in our everyday lives.

  Ana grew up in Bucharest, Romania, and moved to the US for college, where she graduated from Princeton in 2016 with a bachelor's degree in Mathematics and obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2022. Since 2019, she has been co-organizing the Mechanism Design for Social Good initiative and was a Program Co-Chair for the ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization in 2021.

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  Dan Braha

  
  

  Dan Braha is a Commonwealth Professor of Decision and Information Sciences at the University of Massachusetts and is also a co-faculty of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), where he conducts research and teaches courses in complex systems. He previously held visiting professorship positions at the MIT Engineering Systems Division, the MIT’s System Design & Management Program, the MIT Center for Product Development, and Boston University’s Division of Systems Engineering.

  
  Prof. Braha has advanced the area of complex systems by introducing novel methodologies for understanding the functionality, dynamics, robustness, fragility, and control of large-scale social, economic, financial, political, managerial, organizational, and engineering systems. He has published in various prestigious journals, authored and edited nine books, and has been invited to present his work as keynote and plenary speaker in high-profile international conferences and symposiums, including by The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the MIT SDM Systems Thinking, the RAND Corporation, and GE Global Research. His work is also regularly covered by various national and international news media including Science Magazine, The Economist, Wired Magazine, Le Monde, The Huffington Post, New Scientist, The New Republic, Nova, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Standard-Times, International Business Times, The Irish Times, Science and Technology Daily (in Chinese), Business Insider, Technology Review (Published by MIT), and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Prof. Braha’s passion for research is evenly matched with his passion for teaching, where he was honored to receive seven times university teaching awards.

  
  More information about Prof. Braha's work is available at https://necsi.edu/dan-braha-description

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  Daniel Romero

  
  

  Daniel Romero is an Associate Professor of Information, Complex Systems, and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. at the Cornell University Center for Applied Mathematics (CAM) in 2012 and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) from 2012-2014. His main research interest is the empirical and theoretical analysis of Social and Information Networks, with a particular interest in understanding the mechanisms involved in network evolution, information diffusion, and interactions among people on the Web and in complex organizations.

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  Elad Yom-Tov

  
  

  Dr. Elad Yom-Tov is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and an Associate Research Fellow at the Technion. Before joining Microsoft he was with Yahoo Research, IBM Research, and Rafael. Dr. Yom-Tov studied at Tel-Aviv University and the Technion. His primary research interests are in applying large-scale Machine Learning and Information Retrieval methods to medicine. He has published four books, over 180 papers (of which 3 were awarded prizes), and was awarded more than 30 patents. His latest book is “Crowdsourced Health: How What You Do on the Internet Will Improve Medicine” (MIT Press, 2016).

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  Dana Turjeman

  
  

  Dana Turjeman is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Arison School of Business, Reichman University. She holds a PhD in Quantitative Marketing from Ross School of Business in the University of Michigan. Prior to her PhD, she was a software engineer and a technical team lead at Intel corporation, and earned a BSc in Computer Science and an MBA (with honors) from The Hebrew University.

  Dr. Turjeman’s research examines privacy aspects in customer behavior, such as reactions to data breaches, privacy risks and privacy controls, as well as development of privacy protection methods to assist in protecting customer data. She integrates and develops methodologies in causal inference, statistics, computer science and psychology, in order to understand and improve human behavior in privacy settings.

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  Moses Miller

  
  

  Moses Miller is an Assistant Professor at the Data Science department at the Arison School of Business, Reichman University.

  
  He holds a Ph.D. in Data Science and Marketing from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

  
  In his research, Moses uses Data Science and Machine Learning methods to study social influence and advertising in online platforms, and human-machine interaction in creativity and decision-making.

  
  Moses Miller teaches Python Programming, Data Science, and Social Network Analysis He completed his MBA at Tel Aviv University and his BSc in Electrical Engineering at the Technion.