Related papers: Bring your friend! Real or virtual?
The rate at which nodes in a network increase their connectivity depends on their fitness to compete for links. For example, in social networks some individuals acquire more social links than others, or on the www some webpages attract…
We study the optimal joint intervention of a planner who can influence both the standalone marginal utilities of agents in a network and the weights of the links connecting them. The welfare-maximizing intervention displays two key…
It is widely believed that one's peers influence product adoption behaviors. This relationship has been linked to the number of signals a decision-maker receives in a social network. But it is unclear if these same principles hold when the…
Communication networks are essential for our economy and our everyday lives. This makes them lucrative targets for attacks. Today, we see an ongoing battle between criminals that try to disrupt our key communication networks and security…
We study the welfare effects of overreaction to information in the form of diagnostic expectations in markets with asymmetric information, and the effect of a simple intervention in the form of a tax or a subsidy. A large enough level of…
We consider the disclosure problem of a sender with a large data set of hard evidence who wants to persuade a receiver to take higher actions. Because the receiver will make inferences based on the distribution of the data they see, the…
People are influenced by the choices of others, a phenomenon observed across contexts in the social and behavioral sciences. Social influence can lock in an initial popularity advantage of an option over a higher quality alternative. Yet…
Dynamic models and statistical inference for the diffusion of information in social networks is an area which has witnessed remarkable progress in the last decade due to the proliferation of social networks. Modeling and inference of…
We consider a market where a seller sells multiple units of a commodity in a social network. Each node/buyer in the social network can only directly communicate with her neighbours, i.e. the seller can only sell the commodity to her…
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…
We study a model of innovation with a large number of firms that create new technologies by combining several discrete ideas. These ideas are created via private investment and spread between firms. Firms face a choice between secrecy,…
Misleading newsletters can shape individuals' perceptions, and pose a threat to societies; as we witnessed by lowering the severity of follow-up stay-at-home orders and burdening a significant challenge to the fight against COVID-19. In…
Congestion is a common failure mode of markets, where consumers compete inefficiently on the same subset of goods (e.g., chasing the same small set of properties on a vacation rental platform). The typical economic story is that prices…
In diffusion social learning over weakly-connected graphs, it has been shown recently that influential agents shape the beliefs of non-influential agents. This paper analyzes this mechanism more closely and addresses two main questions.…
Most online platforms strive to learn from interactions with users, and many engage in exploration: making potentially suboptimal choices for the sake of acquiring new information. We study the interplay between exploration and competition:…
Recent years have seen a marked increase in the spread of misinformation, a phenomenon which has been accelerated and amplified by social media such as Facebook and Twitter. While some actors spread misinformation to push a specific agenda,…
We consider a brand with a given budget that wants to promote a product over multiple rounds of influencer marketing. In each round, it commissions an influencer to promote the product over a social network, and then observes the subsequent…
We identify influential early adopters in a social network, where individuals are resource constrained, to maximize the spread of multiple, costly behaviors. A solution to this problem is especially important for viral marketing. The…
Influence maximization is the problem of finding a set of influential users in a social network such that the expected spread of influence under a certain propagation model is maximized. Much of the previous work has neglected the important…
Mobile Crowdsensing has shown a great potential to address large-scale problems by allocating sensing tasks to pervasive Mobile Users (MUs). The MUs will participate in a Crowdsensing platform if they can receive satisfactory reward. In…