Related papers: Bring your friend! Real or virtual?
We study how to allocate resources to participants who can strategically misrepresent their deservingness at a cost. A principal assigns item(s) (or money) among multiple agents on the basis of their costly signals. Each agent's signal…
Social scientists have long sought to understand why certain people, items, or options become more popular than others. One seemingly intuitive theory is that inherent value drives popularity. An alternative theory claims that popularity is…
A seller offers an asset in a decentralised market. Buyers have private signals about their common value. I study whether the market becomes allocatively more efficient with (i) more buyers, (ii) better-informed buyers. Both increase the…
This paper investigates the impact of link formation between a pair of agents on the resource availability of other agents (that is, externalities) in a social cloud network, a special case of endogenous sharing economy networks.…
We study how social image concerns shape information sharing among peers. Individuals receive a signal about a binary state of the world characterized by both a direction and a veracity status. While the direction is freely observable,…
Social influence is ubiquitous in cultural markets, from book recommendations in Amazon, to song popularities in iTunes and the ranking of newspaper articles in the online edition of the New York Times to mention only a few. Yet social…
We solve for the equilibrium dynamics of information sharing in a large population. Each agent is endowed with signals regarding the likely outcome of a random variable of common concern. Individuals choose the effort with which they search…
Recent research has explored the increasingly important role of social media by examining the dynamics of individual and group behavior, characterizing patterns of information diffusion, and identifying influential individuals. In this…
The burst in the use of online social networks over the last decade has provided evidence that current rumor spreading models miss some fundamental ingredients in order to reproduce how information is disseminated. In particular, recent…
We experimentally study how redistribution choices are affected by positive and negative information regarding the behaviour of a previous participant in a dictator game with a taking option. We use the strategy method to identify…
In the midst of the influencer marketing boom, more and more companies are shifting resources from real to virtual (or computer-generated) influencers. But while virtual influencers have the potential to engage consumers and drive action,…
How can individual agents coordinate their actions to achieve a shared objective in distributed systems? This challenge spans economic, technical, and sociological domains, each confronting scalability, heterogeneity, and conflicts between…
We study how to optimally segment monopolistic markets with a redistributive objective. We characterize optimal redistributive segmentations and show that they (i) induce the seller to price progressively, i.e., charge richer consumers…
The provision of services by more than one operator over a common network infrastructure, as enabled by 5G network slicing, is analyzed. Two business models to be implemented by a network operator, who owns the network, and a virtual…
Recent empirical findings suggest that societies have become more polarized in various countries. That is, the median voter of today represents a smaller fraction of society compared to two decades ago and yet, the mechanisms underlying…
In social networks, it is often of interest to identify the most influential users who can successfully spread information to others. This is particularly important for marketing (e.g., targeting influencers for a marketing campaign) and to…
I study labor markets in which firms hire via referrals. I develop an employment model showing that--despite initial equality in ability, employment, wages, and network structure--minorities receive fewer jobs through referral and lower…
Understanding susceptibility to online influence is crucial for mitigating the spread of misinformation and protecting vulnerable audiences. This paper investigates susceptibility to influence within social networks, focusing on the…
This paper studies information transmission from multiple senders who compete for the attention of a decision maker. Each sender is partially informed about the state of the world and decides how to reveal her information over time to…
An uninformed sender publicly commits to an informative experiment about an uncertain state, privately observes its outcome, and sends a cheap-talk message to a receiver. We provide an algorithm valid for arbitrary state-dependent…