Related papers: Measuring and Optimizing Cultural Markets
Many policies allocate harms or benefits that are uncertain in nature: they produce distributions over the population in which individuals have different probabilities of incurring harm or benefit. Comparing different policies thus involves…
How does the visual design of digital platforms impact user behavior and the resulting environment? A body of work suggests that introducing social signals to content can increase both the inequality and unpredictability of its success, but…
We study the problem of designing a two-sided market (double auction) to maximize the gains from trade (social welfare) under the constraints of (dominant-strategy) incentive compatibility and budget-balance. Our goal is to do so for an…
The proliferation of online communities has created exciting opportunities to study the mechanisms that explain group success. While a growing body of research investigates community success through a single measure -- typically, the number…
The well-known influence maximization problem aims at maximizing the influence of one information cascade in a social network by selecting appropriate seed users prior to the diffusion process. In its adaptive version, additional seed users…
We are witnessing an increasing use of data-driven predictive models to inform decisions. As decisions have implications for individuals and society, there is increasing pressure on decision makers to be transparent about their decision…
Decisions taken in our everyday lives are based on a wide variety of information so it is generally very difficult to assess what are the strategies that guide us. Stock market therefore provides a rich environment to study how people take…
Recommendation systems are pervasive in the digital economy. An important assumption in many deployed systems is that user consumption reflects user preferences in a static sense: users consume the content they like with no other…
Popularity bias is a well-known phenomenon in recommender systems: popular items are recommended even more frequently than their popularity would warrant, amplifying long-tail effects already present in many recommendation domains. Prior…
How predictable is success in complex social systems? In spite of a recent profusion of prediction studies that exploit online social and information network data, this question remains unanswered, in part because it has not been adequately…
The effectiveness of advertising in e-commerce largely depends on the ability of merchants to bid on and win impressions for their targeted users. The bidding procedure is highly complex due to various factors such as market competition,…
Estimation of social influence in networks can be substantially biased in observational studies due to homophily and network correlation in exposure to exogenous events. Randomized experiments, in which the researcher intervenes in the…
It is part of our daily social-media experience that seemingly ordinary items (videos, news, publications, etc.) unexpectedly gain an enormous amount of attention. Here we investigate how unexpected these events are. We propose a method…
For marketing to function in a globalized world it must respect a diverse set of local cultures. With marketing efforts extending to social media platforms, the crossing of cultural boundaries can happen in an instant. In this paper we…
The primary goal in recommendation is to suggest relevant content to users, but optimizing for accuracy often results in recommendations that lack diversity. To remedy this, conventional approaches such as re-ranking improve diversity by…
It has been assumed that arbitrage profits are not possible in efficient markets, because future prices are not predictable. Here we show that predictability alone is not a sufficient measure of market efficiency. We instead propose to…
Several behavioral, social, and public health interventions, such as suicide/HIV prevention or community preparedness against natural disasters, leverage social network information to maximize outreach. Algorithmic influence maximization…
This paper studies ranking policies in a stylized trial-offer marketplace model, in which a single firm offers products and has consumers with heterogeneous preferences. Consumer trials are influenced by past purchases and the ranking of…
In business, politics and life, folk wisdom encourages people to aim for above-average results, but to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Here, we mathematically formalize and extend this folk wisdom. We model a time-limited…
We apply a physical based model to describe the clothes fashion market. Every time a new outlet appears on the market, it can invade the market under certain specific conditions. Hence, the "old'' outlet can be completely dominated and…