Speaker Ankur Mani - Complex Social Contagion of Churn in Digital Wellness Programs
- Sponsor
- ACE (Agricultural and Consumer Economics)
- Speaker
- Ankur Mani, Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota Industrial and Systems Engineering
- Views
- 14
- Originating Calendar
- ACE Seminars
Abstract:
We study the social contagion of negative wellness activities, focusing on the churn in digital wellness programs. Leveraging a popular digital running program, running field data, and a large social network on a global online fitness platform, we (i) explore the diffusion pattern of running program churn, (ii) investigate the social contagion of churn, and (iii) analyze the heterogeneity of churn contagion. We show that churn diffuses from the network’s peripheral individuals with fewer peers to central individuals with more peers, and such churns are socially contagious. We find that the contagion of churn is a complex contagion, which explains the diffusion pattern. In addition, churn contagion varies by individual characteristics and is confined mainly to sparse network communities. These results suggest that interdependent intervention strategies based on peer connections, network structures, and individual characteristics can effectively prevent wellness program churns, improve individuals’ adherence to wellness activities, and promote individuals’ wellness.Bio:
Ankur Mani is a Levenick Scholar in the Institute of Sustainability, Energy, and Environment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an affiliate faculty in the Industrial and Systems Engineering department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Earlier he received his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and spent a year at the New York University, Stern School of Business and Microsoft Research. His research takes an interdisciplinary approach towards efficient design of infrastructure networks and collective decision making, with applications in sustainable production and consumption, rooted in social and economic sciences, operations research, and computer science. His research has appeared in several prominent venues (Management Science, Production and Operations Management, Nature Human Behavior, ACM Economics and Computation, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Proceedings of the IEEE, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and others) and received accolades within these disciplines (INFORMS, POMS, Aviation Applications Society, Net Institute).