Related papers: Bring a friend! Privately or Publicly?
Online Social Networks (OSNs) attract billions of users to share information and communicate where viral marketing has emerged as a new way to promote the sales of products. An OSN provider is often hired by an advertiser to conduct viral…
It is widely believed that one's peers influence product adoption behaviors. This relationship has been linked to the number of signals a decision-maker receives in a social network. But it is unclear if these same principles hold when the…
Crowdsourced wireless community network enables individual users to share their private Wi-Fi access points (APs) with each other, hence can achieve a large Wi-Fi coverage with a small deployment cost via crowdsourcing. This paper presents…
Viral marketing is different from other marketing strategies since it leverages the influence power in intimate relationship, e.g., close friends, family members, couples. Due to the development and popularity of social networking services,…
I study a social learning model in which the object to learn is a strategic player's endogenous actions rather than an exogenous state. A patient seller faces a sequence of buyers and decides whether to build a reputation for supplying high…
Automated recommendations can nowadays be found on many e-commerce platforms, and such recommendations can create substantial value for consumers and providers. Often, however, not all recommendable items have the same profit margin, and…
We examine information structure design, also called "persuasion" or "signaling", in the presence of a constraint on the amount of communication. We focus on the fundamental setting of bilateral trade, which in its simplest form involves a…
After the Internet and the World Wide Web have become popular and widely-available, the electronically stored online interactions of individuals have fast emerged as a challenge for researchers and, perhaps even faster, as a source of…
Firms strategically disclose product information in order to attract consumers, but recipients often find it costly to process all of it, especially when products have complex features. We study a model of competitive information disclosure…
We study the power of price discrimination via an intermediary in bilateral trade, when there is a revenue-maximizing seller selling an item to a buyer with a private value drawn from a prior. Between the seller and the buyer, there is an…
The emergence of online communities has enabled firms to monitor consumer-generated online word-of-mouth (WOM) in real-time by mining publicly available information from the Internet. A prerequisite for harnessing this new ability is the…
Information sharing on social networks is ubiquitous, intuitive, and occasionally accidental. However, people may be unaware of the potential negative consequences of disclosures, such as reputational damages. Yet, people use social…
Many smart grid frameworks, such as demand response programs, require accurate information about consumers' parameters (e.g., flexibility) at the aggregator side to optimize grid operations. Existing works typically rely on perfect…
We study a market for private data in which a data analyst publicly releases a statistic over a database of private information. Individuals that own the data incur a cost for their loss of privacy proportional to the differential privacy…
We address formally the problem of opinion dynamics when the agents of a social network (e.g., consumers) are not only influenced by their neighbors but also by an external influential entity referred to as a marketer. The influential…
Partnering with a large online retailer, we consider the problem of sending daily personalized promotions to a userbase of over 20 million customers. We propose an efficient policy for determining, every day, the promotion that each…
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…
How do the ratings of critics and amateurs compare and how should they be combined? Previous research has produced mixed results about the first question, while the second remains unanswered. We have created a new, unique dataset, with wine…
A seller is selling a pair of divisible complementary goods to an agent. The agent consumes the goods only in a specific ratio and freely disposes of excess in either goods. The value of the bundle and the ratio are private information of…
An informed seller designs a dynamic mechanism to sell an experience good. The seller has partial information about the product match, which affects the buyer's private consumption experience. We characterize equilibrium mechanisms of this…