4 讨论

本文研究了动态的市场环境下，中心人物对于新产品扩散的作用。从理论上讲，以往的研究从静态的视角出发，只考虑某一时点上中心人物对于新产品的影响（Stephen and Toubia,2010;Goldenberg et al.,2009; Tichy et al.,1979;Ansari et al.,2011）；而实际上，社会网络是动态演进的（Granovetter,1985; Powell and Smith-Doerr,1994），网络中的关系、网络节点的社会结构都是动态变化的（McEvily et al., 2012）。因此我们从动态的视角出发，考察多个时点上中心人物对于新产品扩散的动态影响。研究结果发现：中心人物的存在能够正向促进产品的市场规模，并且随着新产品导入时间的延长，中心人物对新产品扩散的影响逐渐增大；根据采用时间的不同（相对于自身的社会网络），我们把中心人物分为创新性中心人物和跟随型中心人物，随着新产品导入时间的延长，创新型中心人物对新产品扩散规模的影响会逐渐增大，而跟随型中心人物的影响则会随着时间的延长而减小。这样就说明：中心人物（hubs）对新产品扩散的影响并不是一直不变的，而是一个动态变化的过程。从实践的角度上，本文为企业更好地理解中心人物在新产品中的动态扩散过程提供了理论依据，启示企业在进行营销时应在不同的时间点对于不同的中心人物采取不同的侧重点，以便使企业的营销达到事半功倍的效果。

本文也存在着一定的局限性：第一，本文在考虑消费者的连接时，把消费者相互之间的聊天、交易、协同任务等认为是同质的。而实际上，这样的假设存在一定的偏差，因为不同的连接方式可能会形成不同的影响（Ansari et al.,2011）。第二，本文采用的是虚拟社区中虚拟商品的数据，并且我们所选取的样本也是需要消费者支付一定的实体货币才能购买，这和真实的物品还是会有一定的偏差。

为了弥补以上的不足，在未来的研究中，我们会尝试从关系异质性的角度出发，考察不同范式下的中心人物对新产品扩散产生的影响；另外，我们也希望能够得到一些真实环境下新产品扩散的数据，以检验是否与我们的研究结论相一致。

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Do Hubs Produce the Same Influence on the Diffusion of New Product All the Time？

Wang Dianwen①, Huang Minxue①, Zhou Nan ①②

（Economics and Management School, Wuhan University; College of Business, City University of Hong Kong）

Abstract Prior studies hold a view that social network is dynamic, so the actor and tie are.However, the studies about hubs focus on static perspective and investigate the effect of hubs at one point in time.So, this paper checks the influence of hubs to new product diffusion from a dynamic perspective, and we find the impact of hubs will increase with the time extension of new product diffusion.Also, the paper divides two types of hubs:innovator hubs and follower hubs, and it lead to a result that, with the time extension of new product diffusion, the influence of innovator hubs increase and the impact of follower hubs decrease.

Key words New product diffusion, Hubs, Dynamic network, Market size

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