Networks _______________________________________________________
Volterra, and our director Paul Ormerod, have been instrumental in furthering the technical understanding and application of social network analysis. This is not just about online social networks like Facebook and MySpace (although these can be important) but more generally it is the analysis of how people and organisations interact and how different network structures can influence the spread of behaviour. This is becoming increasingly important in many fields, from marketing strategy to public policy making.
Volterra has developed techniques to extract actionable knowledge from these social networks. This enables clients to turn basic behavioural and social information into knowledge which can be used to make business more profitable and policy more effective.
For example, our analysis can help to answer the following questions:
- How does innovation spread amongst firms in a region and how can policy help to improve this flow? [ Manchester Independent Economic Review ]
- How can policy best achieve desirable social ends e.g. increasing savings or reducing unemployment? [ FSA ]
- In your market, how important is social influence in determining sales and success compared to the more traditional, 'objective' factors like price and advertising?
[ Advertising Association ]
- If social influence matters, how does it spread and is it changing over time?
Published earlier this year, our research for the Manchester Independent Economic Review (MIER) identified the sectors in which the Manchester City Region (MCR) has comparative advantage, the dynamics of the MCR innovation system across these sectors and assessment of what public investment would be most effective for the region.
Volterra also recently carried out analysis for the Advertising Association to consider the impact of social networks upon binge drinking. Our analysis showed that imitative behaviour spreading across social networks was sufficient to account for the empirically observed rises in binge drinking.
For the FSA, Volterra used social network analysis to provide insight into whether people use financial services or not. This helped to understand the low take up of the new Basic Advice service. Our work supported the information failure hypothesis - that decision makers often pay attention to people around them when deciding on a course of action, especially where information is limited or complex. This suggests that take-up will remain low unless marketing strategies which recognise the specific features of the networks in place are employed.
The analysis behind all this is highly technical. But at Volterra we operate on the principle of complete transparency. No black boxes! Clients are always given clear non-technical explanations of our results and can access the computer code we use if they wish.
- Reports -
