Related papers: Bring your friend! Real or virtual?
We develop a simple framework to analyze how targeted persuasive advertising shapes market power and welfare. A designer flexibly manipulates the demand curve by influencing individual valuations at a cost. A monopolist prices against this…
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…
This paper studies the effects on user welfare of imposing network neutrality, using a game-theoretic model of provider interactions based on a two-sided market framework: we assume that the platform--the last-mile access providers…
Social marketing is becoming increasingly important in contemporary business. Central to social marketing is quantifying how consumers choose between alternatives and how they influence each other. This work considers a new but simple…
We propose an incentive mechanism for the sponsored content provider market in which the communication of users can be represented by a graph and the private information of the users is assumed to have a continuous distribution function.…
An increasing number of politicians are relying on cheaper, easier to access technologies such as online social media platforms to communicate with their constituency. These platforms present a cheap and low-barrier channel of communication…
This paper studies the provision of a wireless network by a monopolistic provider who may be either benevolent (seeking to maximize social welfare) or selfish (seeking to maximize provider profit). The paper addresses questions that do not…
We study economies where consumers interact independently with many monopolists. When consumer valuations over goods are correlated, correlation can distort the induced distribution of consumer surplus (information rents). We identify which…
Information diffusion and influence maximization are important and extensively studied problems in social networks. Various models and algorithms have been proposed in the literature in the context of the influence maximization problem. A…
A data intermediary acquires signals from individual consumers regarding their preferences. The intermediary resells the information in a product market wherein firms and consumers tailor their choices to the demand data. The social…
Does greater connectivity enhance the value of public information? I study a networked beauty contest game where agents balance adaptation to the fundamental with local coordination. The analysis reveals a stark non-monotonicity: while…
Motivated by applications such as viral marketing, the problem of influence maximization (IM) has been extensively studied in the literature. The goal is to select a small number of users to adopt an item such that it results in a large…
This paper analyzes the strategic interactions between a profit-maximizing monopolist and a free, capacity-constrained public option. By restricting its own supply, the monopolist intentionally congests the public option and induces…
Using the minority game as a model for competition dynamics, we investigate the effects of inter-agent communications on the global evolution of the dynamics of a society characterized by competition for limited resources. The agents…
This work is aimed at studying realistic social control strategies for social networks based on the introduction of random information into the state of selected driver agents. Deliberately exposing selected agents to random information is…
In social network markets, the act of consumer choice in these industries is governed not just by the set of incentives described by conventional consumer demand theory, but by the choices of others in which an individual's payoff is an…
The spread of disinformation (maliciously spread false information) in online social networks has become an important problem in today's society. Disinformation's spread is facilitated by the fact that individuals often accept false…
The partition of society into groups, polarization, and social networks are part of most conversations today. How do they influence price competition? We discuss Bertrand duopoly equilibria with demand subject to network effects. Contrary…
Mechanism design has traditionally assumed that the set of participants are fixed and known to the mechanism (the market owner) in advance. However, in practice, the market owner can only directly reach a small number of participants (her…
Strategic diffusion encourages participants to take active roles in promoting stakeholders' agendas by rewarding successful referrals. As social media continues to transform the way people communicate, strategic diffusion has become a…