Related papers: Social Status and Badge Design
To incentivize users' participations and steer their online activities, online social networks start to provide users with various kinds of rewards for their contributions to the sites. The most frequently distributed rewards include…
Badges are a common, and sometimes the only, method of incentivizing users to perform certain actions on online sites. However, due to many competing factors influencing user temporal dynamics, it is difficult to determine whether the badge…
Badges are endemic to online interaction sites, from Question and Answer (Q&A) websites to ride sharing, as systems for rewarding participants for their contributions. This paper studies how badge design affects people's contributions and…
In many social computing applications such as online Q&A forums, the best contribution for each task receives some high reward, while all remaining contributions receive an identical, lower reward irrespective of their actual qualities.…
Cooperation underlies many aspects of the evolution of human and animal societies, where cooperators produce social goods to benefit others. Explaining the emergence of cooperation among selfish individuals has become a major research…
We study allocation mechanisms that utilize costly signaling as a screening tool. A social planner aims to maximize social welfare, defined as the weighted sum of agents' utilities, while implementing a specific allocation rule. Within a…
Information exchange systems differ in many ways, but all share a common vulnerability to selfish behavior and free-riding. In this paper, we build incentives schemes based on social norms. Social norms prescribe a social strategy for the…
Badges are commonly used in online platforms as incentives for promoting contributions. It is widely accepted that badges "steer" people's behavior toward increasing their rate of contributions before obtaining the badge. This paper…
Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing "the social fabric" (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the bottlenecks and biases of traditional…
Online Social Networks (OSNs) have exploded in terms of scale and scope over the last few years. The unprecedented growth of these networks present challenges in terms of system design and maintenance. One way to cope with this is by…
Nowadays, rating systems play a crucial role in the attraction of customers for different services. However, as it is difficult to detect a fake rating, attackers can potentially impact the rating's aggregated score unfairly. This malicious…
Members of social networks are given opportunities to bestow positive recognition upon one another by means of constructs such as "likes" and "retweets." Although recipients no doubt experience utility from these actions, one might question…
Motivated by applications such as college admission and insurance rate determination, we propose an evaluation problem where the inputs are controlled by strategic individuals who can modify their features at a cost. A learner can only…
Community structure analysis is a powerful tool for social networks, which can simplify their topological and functional analysis considerably. However, since community detection methods have random factors and real social networks obtained…
Many complex networks show signs of modular structure, uncovered by community detection. Although many methods succeed in revealing various partitions, it remains difficult to detect at what scale some partition is significant. This problem…
We consider collaborative systems where users make contributions across multiple available projects and are rewarded for their contributions in individual projects according to a local sharing of the value produced. This serves as a model…
We design profit-maximizing mechanisms to sell an excludable and non-rival good with positive and/or negative network effects. Buyers have heterogeneous private values that depend on how many others also consume the good. In optimum, an…
Mechanism design is now a standard tool in computer science for aligning the incentives of self-interested agents with the objectives of a system designer. There is, however, a fundamental disconnect between the traditional application…
Mechanisms such as auctions and pricing schemes are utilized to design strategic (noncooperative) games for networked systems. Although the participating players are selfish, these mechanisms ensure that the game outcome is optimal with…
Crowdsourcing has emerged as a paradigm for leveraging human intelligence and activity to solve a wide range of tasks. However, strategic workers will find enticement in their self-interest to free-ride and attack in a crowdsourcing contest…