Related papers: Bring a friend! Privately or Publicly?
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…
In markets with search frictions, consumers can acquire information about goods either through costly search or from friends via word-of-mouth (WOM) communication. How do sellers' market power react to a very large increase in the number of…
As compared to the traditional advertising, the word-of-mouth (WOM) communications have striking advantages such as significantly lower cost and rapid delivery; this is especially the case with the popularity of online social networks. This…
When a new product or technology is introduced, potential consumers can learn its quality by trying the product, at a risk, or by letting others try it and free-riding on the information that they generate. We propose a dynamic game to…
Political and advertising campaigns increasingly exploit social networks to spread information and persuade people. This paper studies a persuasion model to examine whether such a strategy is better than simply sending public signals.…
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…
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…
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 consider the pricing problem faced by a seller who assigns a price to a good that confers its benefits not only to its buyers, but also to other individuals around them. For example, a snow-blower is potentially useful not only to the…
Nowadays online social networks are used extensively for personal and commercial purposes. This widespread popularity makes them an ideal platform for advertisements. Social media can be used for both direct and word-of-mouth (WoM)…
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…
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…
A decision maker is choosing between an active action (e.g., purchase a house, invest certain stock) and a passive action. The payoff of the active action depends on the buyer's private type and also an unknown state of nature. An…
We study a Bayesian persuasion setting in which a sender wants to persuade a critical mass of receivers by revealing partial information about the state to them. The homogeneous binary-action receivers are located on a communication…
This paper studies a sale promotion mechanism design problem on a social network, where a node (a seller) sells one item to the other nodes on the network to maximize her revenue. However, the seller does not know other nodes except for her…
Consider a market where a seller owns an item for sale and a buyer wants to purchase it. Each player has private information, known as their type. It can be costly and difficult for the players to reach an agreement through direct…
We study the algorithmic problem faced by an information holder (seller) who wants to optimally sell such information to a budged-constrained decision maker (buyer) that has to undertake some action. Differently from previous, we consider…
The celebrated Bayesian persuasion model considers strategic communication between an informed agent (the sender) and uninformed decision makers (the receivers). The current rapidly-growing literature mostly assumes a dichotomy: either the…
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…
This paper develops a model in which a sender strategically communicates with a group of receivers whose payoffs depend on the sender's information. It is shown that aggregate payoff externalities create an endogenous conflict of interests…