Exploring Causal Effect of Personal Financial Activities by Social Media Influences

Abstract

Social network (SN) applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. provide many facilities that allow the user to connect, follow one another, share content, and influence them to engage in various activities in their personal lives. Sometimes it impacts their habits such as online buying, restaurant checkin, traveling, etc. Existing researchers have used a variety of approaches to identify these impacts on various topics, including fitness, psychological health, and so on. However, there is very few research that has been done for investigating individual expenditures. Thus, in this paper, we aim to 1) investigate the relationship between social media use and personal financial activities, 2) estimate personal expenditure based on various social media aspects such as checking into restaurants, buying clothes, traveling to new locations, doing something entertaining, and so on. We collected data through an online survey using social network platforms such as Facebook. We apply a causal model using propensity score-based inverse probability treatment weighting (IPTW) and a doubly robust estimator. We evaluate our approach by refuting the outcome. Finally, we find that social media usage has a significant impact on spending patterns.