The diffusion of mobile social networking: Further study

In a recent study, Scaglione et al. (2015) analyzed the diffusion of mobile social networking in four G7 countries. Using Bass’s model and Bemmaor’s Gamma/Shifted Gompertz (G/SG) model, they found evidence of a left skew in the right-censored distributions of the times to adoption in three countries out of four. However, this conclusion relied on the skewness parameter of Bemmaor’s model. We reanalyze the data, making use of three special cases of the G/SG as well as the full version. Extending the data set to six countries, we show that (i) fitting the four models to the data does not allow us to discriminate between models, but (ii) forecasting the subsequent adoptions provides a strong support of right skewness in the data set: each country (except France) shows a substantial mass of later adopters of mobile social networking following an initial embrace of the access.