Related papers: Bring your friend! Real or virtual?
Individuals accepting an idea may intentionally or unintentionally impose influences in a certain neighborhood area, making other individuals within the area less likely or even impossible to accept other competing ideas. Depending on…
We consider a model of oligopolistic competition in a market with search frictions, in which competing firms with products of unknown quality advertise how much information a consumer's visit will glean. In the unique symmetric equilibrium…
One of the key features of this paper is that the agents' opinion of a social network is assumed to be not only influenced by the other agents but also by two marketers in competition. One of our contributions is to propose a pragmatic…
In many shopping scenarios, e.g., in online shopping, customers have a large menu of options to choose from. However, most of the buyers do not browse all the options and make decision after considering only a small part of the menu. To…
An informed sender communicates with an uninformed receiver through a sequence of uninformed mediators; agents' utilities depend on receiver's action and the state. For any number of mediators, the sender's optimal value is characterized.…
Many real-life settings of consumer-choice involve social interactions, causing targeted policies to have spillover-effects. This paper develops novel empirical tools for analyzing demand and welfare-effects of policy-interventions in…
We study price regulation for a monopolist operating in networked markets with demand spillovers. Achieving efficiency requires price reductions proportional to consumers' Katz-Bonacich centralities, which generally cannot be implemented by…
Viral marketing takes advantage of preexisting social networks among customers to achieve large changes in behaviour. Models of influence spread have been studied in a number of domains, including the effect of "word of mouth" in the…
Players allocate their budget to links, a local public good and a private good. A player links to free ride on others' public good provision. We derive sufficient conditions for the existence of a Nash equilibrium. In equilibrium, large…
Social connections are conduits through which individuals communicate, information propagates, and diseases spread. Identifying individuals who are more likely to adopt ideas and spread them is essential in order to develop effective…
This paper studies optimal mechanisms for collecting and trading data. Consumers benefit from revealing information about their tastes to a service provider because this improves the service. However, the information is also valuable to a…
Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the…
In the age of information abundance, attention is a coveted resource. Social media platforms vigorously compete for users' engagement, influencing the evolution of their opinions on a variety of topics. With recommendation algorithms often…
We study a social bandit problem featuring production and diffusion of knowledge. While higher connectivity enhances knowledge diffusion, it may reduce knowledge production as agents shy away from experimentation with new ideas and free…
We explore a model of duopolistic competition in which consumers learn about the fit of each competitor's product. In equilibrium, consumers comparison shop: they learn only about the relative values of the products. When information is…
A monopolist seller of multiple goods screens a buyer whose type is initially unknown to both but drawn from a commonly known distribution. The buyer privately learns about his type via a signal. We derive the seller's optimal mechanism in…
Information sharing dynamics of social networks rely on a small set of influencers to effectively reach a large audience. Our recent results and observations demonstrate that the shape and identity of this elite, especially those…
Redistribution mechanisms have been proposed for more efficient resource allocation but not for profit. We consider redistribution mechanism design in a setting where participants are connected and the resource owner is only connected to…
A mediator is a well-known construct in game theory, and is an entity that plays on behalf of some of the agents who choose to use its services, while the rest of the agents participate in the game directly. We initiate a game theoretic…
We study a problem inspired by regulated health insurance markets, such as those created by the government in the Affordable Care Act Exchanges or by employers when they contract with private insurers to provide plans for their employees.…