Phone Adoption in a Complex Multi-layered Network
When one of my Korean friends told me that Samsung phones were much more popular than iPhones in South Korea, I almost didn’t believe him. It seemed to me like most of my friends from South Korea on campus had iPhones, so how could it be possible that Samsung was more popular? Sure enough, I looked online and found that Samsung phones represented more than 69% of the South Korean mobile phone market, as opposed to the United States’ 24%[1, 2].
Although I was dumbfounded by this statistic, the phenomenon reminded me of my global ignorance and the homophilous nature of the network representing my social life. It also makes me think about the idea of behavioral adoption in a complex network. In class, we discussed the adoption of behavior through an adoption threshold and the inability of behavior to diffuse into dense clusters. Many of the examples we reviewed were binary, either the behavior is adopted, or it isn’t. However, the phone market is more complicated than simply adopting cell phones or not. I like to think of it as an infinite amount of options that is part of the set
S ={ No adoption, Adopt iPhone, Adopt Samsung, … , Adopt some other Phone X}
When introducing a seemingly infinite amount of adoptions, the network becomes more complicated than initially expected. To familiarize this amount of adoptions with the concepts we have discussed in class, we will say that any person will adopt a new phone type if a fraction q of their friends also use the phone. This could mean that one phone could “overwrite” another in the network.
The idea that one phone can “overwrite” another in the network is important to show exactly why timing and location in the network mean everything. In the case of the United States, Apple is a California-based company, and the iPhone was released in the United States in June 2007[3]. By the time the first Samsung Galaxy was available globally in June 2009[4], networks were already well on their way to adopting the iPhone. In the case of South Korea, the iPhone remained unreleased until November 2009, which although only a couple of months after the Galaxy’s release, this time coupled with the fact that Samsung had their employees utilize the Galaxy for personal use was enough of a push to have the Samsung Galaxy completely take over South Korea before Apple even had a chance.
Recently in Korea, news outlets have reported that young members of the population prefer iPhones to Samsung, a survey finding that the iPhone market share for younger generations (18-29) in the cellphone market (18-29) has risen to 65%[5]. Why is it the case that there are different findings between age groups and countries in the global network? Multi-layer networks are important.
Multi-layer networks are the idea that people exist in multiple different layers of networks at once that are not necessarily connected. Think about one layer being the friends on a social media network, whereas another layer could include the people you interact with at your job. The main idea to grasp from our understanding of multi-layer networks is that it is the same individuals show drastically different behavior on different network layers, meaning that it is difficult for behavior to transfer through layers[6]. This is important to the idea of iPhone vs. Samsung because of the perplexities existing in the network of South Koreans. We see that there is a layer of a young generation that is adopting new behavior (the adoption of the iPhone instead of Samsung), and the popularity is spreading through this layer. However, it is very difficult for this to spread to the older generation because their layer can be seen as one dense cluster. As this younger generation gets older, I am curious to see if the iPhone continues to grow in popularity due to diffusion of adopted behavior, or if there is something about age that causes individuals in South Korea to prefer Samsung (I’d like to think it’s the former).
Sources:
- United States Mobile Vendor Market Share: https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/united-states
- South Korea Mobile Vendor Market Share: https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/south-korea
- History of the iPhone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_iPhone
- Samsung Galaxy (original): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_(original)
- Young Koreans favor iPhones over Samsung Galaxy: survey: https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20230720000592
- Analysis of Influence of Behavioral Adoption Threshold Diversity on Multi-Layer Network: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10047583/