Related papers: Bring a friend! Privately or Publicly?
Today, many wireless device providers choose to sell devices bundled with complementary mobile social services, which exhibit strong positive network externality. This paper aims to quantify the benefits of selling devices and complementary…
Recommender system has been deployed in a large amount of real-world applications, profoundly influencing people's daily life and production.Traditional recommender models mostly collect as comprehensive as possible user behaviors for…
Social advertising uses information about consumers' peers, including peer affiliations with a brand, product, organization, etc., to target ads and contextualize their display. This approach can increase ad efficacy for two main reasons:…
Motivated by information sharing in online platforms, we study repeated persuasion between a sender and a stream of receivers where at each time, the sender observes a payoff-relevant state drawn independently and identically from an…
We examine receiver-optimal mechanisms for aggregating information divided across many biased senders. Each sender privately observes an unconditionally independent signal about an unknown state, so no sender can verify another's report. A…
The spread of rumors through social media and online social networks can not only disrupt the daily lives of citizens but also result in loss of life and property. A rumor spreads when individuals, who are unable decide the authenticity of…
We consider a revenue optimizing seller selling a single item to a buyer, on whose private value the seller has a noisy signal. We show that, when the signal is kept private, arbitrarily more revenue could potentially be extracted than if…
Diffusion auction design is a new trend in mechanism design for which the main goal is to incentivize existing buyers to invite new buyers, who are their neighbors on a social network, to join an auction even though they are competitors.…
A simple advertising strategy that can be used to help increase sales of a product is to mail out special offers to selected potential customers. Because there is a cost associated with sending each offer, the optimal mailing strategy…
This work addresses private communication with distributed systems in mind. We consider how to best use secret key resources and communication to transmit signals across a system so that an eavesdropper is least capable to act on the…
Problem definition: Corporate brands, grassroots activists, and ordinary citizens all routinely employ Word-of-mouth (WoM) diffusion to promote products and instigate social change. Our work models the formation and spread of negative…
Now-a-days, Online Social Networks (OSNs) are extensively used by different commercial houses for viral marketing. The key problem that arises in this context is to choose a limited number of highly influential users as the initial adopters…
A sender with private preferences would like to influence a receiver's action by providing information through a statistical test. The technology for information production is controlled by a monopolist intermediary, who offers a menu of…
This paper studies strategic communication in the context of social learning. Product reviews are used by consumers to learn product quality, but in order to write a review, a consumer must be convinced to purchase the item first. When…
With the recent surge of social networks like Facebook, new forms of recommendations have become possible -- personalized recommendations of ads, content, and even new social and product connections based on one's social interactions. In…
A competitive market is modeled as a game of incomplete information. One player observes some payoff-relevant state and can sell (possibly noisy) messages thereof to the other, whose willingness to pay is contingent on their own beliefs. We…
Word-of-Mouth (WoM) communication, via online reviews, plays an important role in customers' purchasing decisions. As such, retailers must consider the impact of WoM to manage customer perceptions and future demand. In this paper, we…
We present a new model for reasoning about the way information is shared among friends in a social network, and the resulting ways in which it spreads. Our model formalizes the intuition that revealing personal information in social…
An operator-assisted user-provided network (UPN) has the potential to achieve a low cost ubiquitous Internet connectivity, without significantly increasing the network infrastructure investment. In this paper, we consider such a network…
In the following work, we compare the spread of information by word-of-mouth (WOM) to the spread of information through search engines. We assume that the initial acknowledgement of new information derives from social interactions but that…