This paper shows that Medical Innovation (Coleman, Katz and Menzel 1966) and several subsequent studies analyzing the diffusion of the drug tetracycline have confounded social contagion with marketing effects. First, we describe the medical community’s understanding of tetracycline and how the drug was marketed at the time the Medical Innovation data were collected. We find little reason to exp...

This paper develops an analytical model of contagion in financial networks with arbitrary structure. We explore how the probability and potential impact of contagion is influenced by aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks, changes in network structure, and asset market liquidity. Our findings suggest that financial systems exhibit a robust-yet-fragile tendency: while the probability of contagion ma...

The recent crisis has demonstrated the close linkages between various asset classes within a country as well as the association between assets internationally. The aim of this research is to provide for a better understanding of some of these linkages by conducting an empirical investigation of the channels underlying the risk of contagion between real estate and financial markets in the United...

OBJECTIVES Despite the common use of contagion to analogize the spread of suicide, there is a lack of rigorous assessment of the underlying concept or theory supporting the use of this term. The present study aims to examine the varied definitions and potential utility of the term contagion in suicide-related research. METHODS 100 initial records and 240 reference records in English were iden...

We consider the propagation of a contagion process (“epidemic”) on a network and study the problem of dynamically allocating a fixed curing budget to the nodes of the graph, at each time instant. We provide a dynamic policy for the rapid containment of a contagion process modeled as an SIS epidemic on a bounded degree undirected graph with n nodes. We show that if the budget r of curing resourc...

Social and biological contagions are influenced by the spatial embeddedness of networks. Historically, many epidemics spread as a wave across part of the Earth's surface; however, in modern contagions long-range edges-for example, due to airline transportation or communication media-allow clusters of a contagion to appear in distant locations. Here we study the spread of contagions on networks ...

This thesis introduces a model for epidemics on networks based on the classical Polya process. Temporal contagion processes are generated on the network nodes using a modified Polya sampling scheme that accounts for spatial infection among neighbouring nodes. The stochastic properties and asymptotic behaviour of the resulting network Polya contagion process are analyzed. Given the complicated n...

This paper investigates the variation in contagion effect of corporate scandals on peers firms with different corporate governance quality. We find that better corporate governance reduces investors’ uncertainty about a firm’s fundamental value and alleviates the contagion effect of scandals. Specifically, the empirical results show that external governance, ownership structure and external aud...