The effect of conference presentations on the diffusion of ideas

Conferences are ubiquitous in many industries, but how effectively they diffuse ideas has been debated and the mechanisms of diffusion unclear. Conference attendees can adopt ideas from presentations they choose to see (direct effect) or see incidentally (serendipity effect). We quantify these direct and serendipitous effects of academic conference presentations on future citations by exploiting quasi-random scheduling conflicts. When multiple papers of interest to an attendee are presented at the same time, the person is less able to see them on average and, if seeing presentations is important, cites them less. We use data from Confer, a scheduling application deployed at 25 in-person computer science conferences that lets users Like papers and receive personalized schedules. Compared to timeslots with many conflicts, users cited Liked papers with no scheduling conflicts 52% more. Users also cited non-Liked papers in sessions with no conflicts 51% more, and this serendipitous diffusion accounted for 22% of the overall diffusion induced by presentations. The study shows that conference presentations stimulate substantial direct and serendipitous diffusion of ideas, and adds the analysis of scheduling conflicts to the toolkit of management scholars.