The Influentials

With the new year I'm introducing a new top-level category on my Web site for "economics"; some past postings that fit in there have been moved into the new category, which will probably break links.  Anyway, today's new item is from an article in Science News on the place of highly influential individuals (called "influentials") in viral propagation of ideas.  New research by Watts and Dodds (PDF preprint) suggests that such individuals aren't so important after all; if you want lots of people to adopt something, you're actually better off concentrating on the most easily influenced people in the population, so as to get as many of those as possible.  Sheer numbers are the important factor, not having the adopters be the more influential members of the population. [1665 words...] NEW: a couple of typo fixes