Record Details

Modeling Diffusion of Many Innovations via Multilevel Diffusion Curves: With an Application to Payola in Pop Music Radio (M1138V1)

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Modeling Diffusion of Many Innovations via Multilevel Diffusion Curves: With an Application to Payola in Pop Music Radio (M1138V1)
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/BGYLYD
 
Creator Rossman, Gabriel
Chiu, Ming Ming
Mol, Joeri
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description We introduce a new statistical method – multilevel diffusion curves – to model how multiple innovations spread through an industry. Specifically, we analyze when radio stations begin broadcasting 534 pop singles. Ordinarily radio stations imitate one another, an endogenous process producing a characteristic “s-curve.” However, payola can dwarf this process and produce a characteristic negative exponential curve, controlling for the song artist's number of successful songs in the past year. Therefore the shape of a song’s cumulative adoption function indicates whether its rise involved corruption. We validate this heuristic against a panel of songs with a documented history of payola and a comparable set of songs with no such allegations. Compared to earlier methods, multilevel diffusion curves allow testing of more types of hypotheses, model a greater range of data, and are statistically more efficient and precise.
 
Date 2012
 
Type Raw data and evidentiary material