Before revision: Does receiving a gift encourage the recipient to send more gifts ? Causal identification of behavioral contagion is very challenging , especially based on observational datafrom social networks. Given that the online monetary gift (also known as a "red packet") in WeChat groups is randomly split between group members, we are able to conduct a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of receiving online red packets on the contagion of gift exchange.
After revision: Does receiving a gift encourage the recipient to send more gifts ? Causal identification of contagion is always challenging in observational data; To identify gift contagion, we leverage a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of receiving online red packets on the contagion of gift exchange.