Related papers: Measuring and Optimizing Cultural Markets
There are a number of measures of direct and indirect effects in the literature. They are suitable in some cases and unsuitable in others. We describe a case where the existing measures are unsuitable and propose new suitable ones. We also…
Social media platforms systematically reward popularity over authenticity, incentivizing users to strategically tailor their expression for attention. In this paper, we introduce (i) popularity as a strategic expression mechanism, distinct…
Statistical inferential results generally come with a measure of reliability for decision-making purposes. For a policy implementer, the value of implementing published policy research depends critically upon this reliability. For a policy…
The ability to compute reward-optimal policies for given and known finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) underpins a variety of applications across planning, controller synthesis, and verification. However, we often want policies (1) to…
The influence maximization paradigm has been used by researchers in various fields in order to study how information spreads in social networks. While previously the attention was mostly on efficiency, more recently fairness issues have…
Policymakers often face the decision of how to allocate resources across many different policies using noisy estimates of policy impacts. This paper develops a framework for optimal policy choices under statistical uncertainty. I consider a…
In the name of meritocracy, modern economies devote increasing amounts of resources to quantifying and ranking the performance of individuals and organisations. Rankings send out powerful signals, which lead to identify the actions of top…
The beneficial effects of treatments vary across individuals in most studies. Treatment heterogeneity motivates practitioners to search for the optimal policy based on personal characteristics. A long-standing common practice in policy…
Engaged costumers are a very import part of current social media marketing. Public figures and brands have to be very careful about what to post online. That is why the need for accurate strategies for anticipating the impact of a post…
This paper surveys mathematical models, structural results and algorithms in controlled sensing with social learning in social networks. Part 1, namely Bayesian Social Learning with Controlled Sensing addresses the following questions: How…
Measuring social influence is difficult due to the lack of counter-factuals and comparisons. By combining machine learning-based modeling and network science, we present general properties of social value, a recent measure for social…
The rapid growth of e-commerce has made people accustomed to shopping online. Before making purchases on e-commerce websites, most consumers tend to rely on rating scores and review information to make purchase decisions. With this…
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…
Influence maximization (IM) has garnered a lot of attention in the literature owing to applications such as viral marketing and infection containment. It aims to select a small number of seed users to adopt an item such that adoption…
People in the Internet era have to cope with the information overload, striving to find what they are interested in, and usually face this situation by following a limited number of sources or friends that best match their interests. A…
Many internet platforms that collect behavioral big data use it to predict user behavior for internal purposes and for their business customers (e.g., advertisers, insurers, security forces, governments, political consulting firms) who…
Viral campaigns are crucial methods for word-of-mouth marketing in social communities. The goal of these campaigns is to encourage people for activity. The problem of incentivised and non-incentivised campaigns is studied in the paper.…
Affine policies (or control) are widely used as a solution approach in dynamic optimization where computing an optimal adjustable solution is usually intractable. While the worst case performance of affine policies can be significantly bad,…
Social networks have become an increasingly common abstraction to capture the interactions of individual users in a number of everyday activities and applications. As a result, the analysis of such networks has attracted lots of attention…
Social media influencers account for a growing share of marketing worldwide. We demonstrate the existence of a novel form of market failure in this advertising market: influencer cartels, where groups of influencers collude to increase…