Student Snags Ticket to Paris

Knowing that board games were her freshman roommate’s favorite childhood toys landed a disbelieving Eliot House sophomore two plane tickets to Paris—a prize she received last night as part of thefacebook.com’s Friends Trivia Game.

“It was a toss-up between board games and Legos and then I remembered she played a lot of Scrabble last year, so that’s what I answered,” said Yiyang Wu ’07, who won the plane ticket as the first of three grand prize trips to Paris worth $500 each. By the holidays, almost $10,000 in small prizes and plane tickets will be awarded.

But the prizes and trivia game are actually a means for two Harvard economics researchers to study social networks.

Assistant Economics Professor Markus M. Möbius worked with first-year economics graduate student Paul F. Niehaus ’04 to create the game, which required students to list the names of 10 friends to participate in the game.

Using these lists of names, Mobius and Niehaus will be able to create a visual map of social networks at Harvard to see how friendship networks and cliques develop across demographic lines.

“Economists have become increasingly interested in non-market interactions,” said Mobius. “The web seemed a natural extension of this research. Instead of doing this at the lab, why not have the subjects do it at home?”

This year’s study findings will be available around Christmas, and Niehaus said that the pair would like to continue the program for the next several years to see the evolution of these networks.

“Studying how people change friends over their four years would be unprecedented research,” said Niehaus. “We’re also thinking of at least maybe doing this at one other school.”

Facebook creators wrote the computer code for the game, while Mobius and Niehaus funded the prizes through grants from their department’s research account.

According to the game’s creators, Wu is one of the 26 percent of facebook users who have already participated in the Friends Trivia Game. As more prizes—including free dinners, movie tickets and yoga classes—are awarded, the game’s creators hope that at least 50 percent of facebook users will eventually participate. Almost 92 percent of Harvard undergraduates are already facebook users, the creators said.

“I only signed up last week and answered one question about myself and one about my friend,” said an incredulous Wu. “The one I answered about my friend was right and I turned out to be the winner.”

By the time she accepted her plane tickets, Wu said she wasn’t yet able to answer the question on everyone’s mind: who would accompany her? “It will probably be my boyfriend,” she said.

But the prize is cash refundable. “We’ll see if I actually go to Paris. I might take a cruise instead,” Wu said.

She is still glowing from her win.

“I never win anything in contests like this,” she explained. “Needless to say, no work was done that night.”