Related papers: Pricing and Referrals in Diffusion on Networks

A buyer and a seller bargain over the price of an object. Both players can build reputations for being obstinate by offering the same price over time. Before players bargain, the seller decides whether to adopt a new technology that can…

Consumers can acquire information through their own search efforts or through their social network. Information diffusion via word-of-mouth communication leads to some consumers free-riding on their "friends" and less information…

We consider the problem of devising incentive strategies for viral marketing of a product. In particular, we assume that the seller can influence penetration of the product by offering two incentive programs: a) direct incentives to…

We study the optimal pricing strategy of a monopolist selling homogeneous goods to customers over multiple periods. The customers choose their time of purchase to maximize their payoff that depends on their valuation of the product, the…

How can a system designer exploit system-level knowledge to derive incentives to optimally influence social behavior? The literature on network routing contains many results studying the application of monetary tolls to influence behavior…

As a firm varies the price of a product, consumers exhibit reference effects, making purchase decisions based not only on the prevailing price but also the product's price history. We consider the problem of learning such behavioral…

We study the optimal referral strategy of a seller and its relationship with the type of communication channels among consumers. The seller faces a partially uninformed population of consumers, interconnected through a directed social…

A monopolist faces a partially uninformed population of consumers, interconnected through a directed social network. In the network, the monopolist offers rewards to informed consumers (influencers) conditional on informing uninformed…

Modern recommendation systems rely on the wisdom of the crowd to learn the optimal course of action. This induces an inherent mis-alignment of incentives between the system's objective to learn (explore) and the individual users' objective…

In many real world networks agents are initially unsure of each other's qualities and must learn about each other over time via repeated interactions. This paper is the first to provide a methodology for studying the dynamics of such…

We propose and design recommendation systems that incentivize efficient exploration. Agents arrive sequentially, choose actions and receive rewards, drawn from fixed but unknown action-specific distributions. The recommendation system…

We consider a two-road dynamic routing game where the state of one of the roads (the "risky road") is stochastic and may change over time. This generates room for experimentation. A central planner may wish to induce some of the (finite…

An agent acquires information dynamically until her belief about a binary state reaches an upper or lower threshold. She can choose any signal process subject to a constraint on the rate of entropy reduction. Strategies are ordered by "time…

As modern social networks allow for faster and broader interactions with friends and acquaintances, online referral programs that promote sales through existing users are becoming increasingly popular. Because it is all too common that…

Online platforms in the Internet Economy commonly incorporate recommender systems that recommend products (or "arms") to users (or "agents"). A key challenge in this domain arises from myopic agents who are naturally incentivized to exploit…

We study the revenue-maximizing mechanism when a buyer's value evolves endogenously because of learning-by-consuming. A seller sells one unit of a divisible good, while the buyer relies on his private, rough valuation to choose his…

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…

Before purchase, a buyer of an experience good learns about the product's fit using various information sources, including some of which the seller may be unaware of. The buyer, however, can conclusively learn the fit only after purchasing…

We study the use of viral marketing strategies on social networks to maximize revenue from the sale of a single product. We propose a model in which the decision of a buyer to buy the product is influenced by friends that own the product…

Motivated by information sharing in online platforms, we study repeated persuasion between a sender and a stream of receivers where at each time, the sender observes a payoff-relevant state drawn independently and identically from an…