Threshold of Herd Effect for Online Events in China

摘要

Herd effect, as a way people are influenced by others, is popular in Internet. Prior empirical work has shown that when the online purchase passes one particular threshold, it is more likely that people are influenced by the product purchase may become hot. For online events, is there the same phenomena? Based on the data collected from SinaWeibo, the largest microblog in China, we use the fluctuation scaling method to analyze the influence process online. We also found the particular threshold for online events. Once the follow-up number of some event surpasses a particular threshold of popularity, collective behavior is easily to be observed. Interestingly, we classified all events into three types, political events, social events and non-public events. The threshold for these different types of events varies. The lowest threshold for social events can be explained by some offline surveys too.