UC Irvine

This research consists of three essays which develop dynamic network models to examine the process of market creation. All three essays use Twitter data from gourmet food trucks operating in Southern California to explore how firms balance cooperation and competition. The first essay explores the role of status and proposes that market creation can be understood as the formation of a social hierarchy. The second essay examines the role of social contagion in influencing how mobile firms make location decisions. The third essay seeks to determine how cooperation emerges and is sustained within a group of competing firms despite rewards for selfish behavior. Taken together, these studies suggest that social processes drawn from research in sociology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology help firms to balance cooperation and competition during market creation. Further, this research provides a general framework for the exploration of dynamic networks in marketing.