Jonah Berger will appear at the South by Bookstore to sign copies of “Contagious: Why Things Catch On” following his book reading session.

Professor Jonah Berger, of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, studies social epidemics, or how products, ideas, and behaviors catch on and become popular. He examines how individual decision making and social dynamics between people generate collective outcomes such as social contagion and trends. Most recently, Professor Berger has examined why certain products get more word-of-mouth than others and why certain online content goes viral. Professor Berger will explain the six steps that make products or ideas contagious in his forthcoming book, Contagious: Why Products and Ideas Catch On . At Wharton, where Berger is the James G. Campbell Jr. Assistant Professor of Marketing, he teaches a marketing elective by the same name.
Berger’s research has been published in top-tier academic journals, and popular accounts of his work have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Science, Harvard Business Review, Business Week, Wired, and more.