Related papers: Bring a friend! Privately or Publicly?
Viral marketing is becoming important due to the popularity of online social networks (OSNs). Companies may provide incentives (e.g., via free samples of a product) to a small group of users in an OSN, and these users provide…
Propagating information to more people through their friends is becoming an increasingly important technology used in domains such as blockchain, advertising, and social media. To incentivize people to broadcast the information, the…
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…
We consider a monopoly information holder selling information to a budget-constrained decision maker, who may benefit from the seller's information. The decision maker has a utility function that depends on his action and an uncertain state…
Social learning constitutes a fundamental framework for studying interactions among rational agents who observe each other's actions but lack direct access to individual beliefs. This paper investigates a specific social learning paradigm…
With the recent surge of social networks like Facebook, new forms of recommendations have become possible - personalized recommendations of ads, content, and even new friend and product connections based on one's social interactions. Since…
Many studies have explored spreading and diffusion through complex networks. The following study examines a specific case of spreading of opinions in modern society through two spreading schemes, defined as being either through…
This paper studies a mechanism design problem over a network, where agents can only participate by referrals. The Bulow-Klemberer theorem proposes that expanding the number of participants is a more effective approach to increase revenue…
Mobile social network applications constitute an important platform for traffic information sharing, helping users collect and share sensor information about the driving conditions they experience on the traveled path in real time. In this…
This paper studies a stylized model of a monopoly data seller when information-sharing network exists among data buyers. We show that, if the buyers' prior information is sufficiently noisy, the optimal selling strategy is characterized by…
The prevalence of online social network makes it compulsory to study how social relations affect user choice. However, most existing methods leverage only first-order social relations, that is, the direct neighbors that are connected to the…
The Bayesian persuasion paradigm of strategic communication models interaction between a privately-informed agent, called the sender, and an ignorant but rational agent, called the receiver. The goal is typically to design a (near-)optimal…
A monopoly platform sells either a risky product (with unknown utility) or a safe product (with known utility) to agents who sequentially arrive and learn the utility of the risky product by the reporting of previous agents. It is costly…
As modern social networks allow for faster and broader interactions with friends and acquaintances, online referral programs that promote sales through existing users are becoming increasingly popular. Because it is all too common that…
Campaigners, advertisers and activists are increasingly turning to social recommendation mechanisms, provided by social media, for promoting their products, services, brands and even ideas. However, many times, such social network based…
Online Social Networks (OSNs) have come to play an increasingly important role in our social lives, and their inherent privacy problems have become a major concern for users. Can we assist consumers in their privacy decision-making…
By now, Internet word-of-mouth marketing has established its importance for almost every kind of products. When word-of-mouth spread of a marketing campaign goes viral, the success of its strategy has been proved to be path-breaking for the…
This paper investigates the value of recommendations for disseminating economic information, with a focus on frictions resulting from preference heterogeneity. We consider Bayesian expected-payoff maximizers who receive non-strategic…
This paper studies the persuasion of a receiver who accesses information only if she exerts costly attention effort. A sender designs an experiment to persuade the receiver to take a specific action. The experiment affects the receiver's…
With the growing importance of corporate viral marketing campaigns on online social networks, the interest in studies of influence propagation through networks is higher than ever. In a viral marketing campaign, a firm initially targets a…