Related papers: Seeding an Uncertain Technology
In a competitive marketing, there are a large number of players which produce the same product. Each firm aims to diffuse its product information widely so that it's product will become popular among potential buyers. The more popular is a…
It is well known that sequential decision making may lead to information cascades. That is, when agents make decisions based on their private information, as well as observing the actions of those before them, then it might be rational to…
Diffusion is a fundamental graph process, underpinning such phenomena as epidemic disease contagion and the spread of innovation by word-of-mouth. We address the algorithmic problem of finding a set of k initial seed nodes in a network so…
Cyber attacks continue to be a cause of concern despite advances in cyber defense techniques. Although cyber attacks cannot be fully prevented, standard decision-making frameworks typically focus on how to prevent them from succeeding,…
In this paper, we study the Multi-Round Influence Maximization (MRIM) problem, where influence propagates in multiple rounds independently from possibly different seed sets, and the goal is to select seeds for each round to maximize the…
A principal and an agent face symmetric uncertainty about the value of two correlated projects for the agent. The principal chooses which project values to publicly discover and makes a proposal to the agent, who accepts if and only if the…
The ranking and selection problem is a popular framework in the simulation literature for studying optimal information collection. We study a version of this problem in which the simulation output for each design is normally distributed…
The goal of this paper is to develop a principled understanding of when it is beneficial to bundle technologies or services whose value is heavily dependent on the size of their user base, i.e., exhibits positive exernalities. Of interest…
We consider agents in a social network competing to be selected as partners in collaborative, mutually beneficial activities. We study this through a model in which an agent i can initiate a limited number k_i>0 of games and selects the…
In a social network, even about the same information the excitements between different pairs of users are different. If you want to spread a piece of new information and maximize the expected total amount of excitements, which seed users…
When nodes can repeatedly update their behavior (as in agent-based models from computational social science or repeated-game play settings) the problem of optimal network seeding becomes very complex. For a popular spreading-phenomena model…
Network intervention problems often benefit from selecting a highly-connected node to perform interventions using these nodes, e.g. immunization. However, in many network contexts, the structure of network connections is unknown, leading to…
In this paper the problem of information dissemination in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) is studied. The problem is to disseminate a piece of information, initially held by a distinguished source node, to all nodes in a set defined by some…
We consider multi-agent systems where agents' preferences are aggregated via sequential majority voting: each decision is taken by performing a sequence of pairwise comparisons where each comparison is a weighted majority vote among the…
Online lending, a phenomenon which is becoming mainstream due to the migration of consumer finance to the Internet and the adoption of AI based lending models, is an example of learning by doing. This paper studies optimal policies for a…
Organisms that grow and survive in uncertain environments may need to change their physiological state as the environment changes. When the environment is uncertain, one strategy known as bet-hedging is to make these changes randomly and…
Most experimental studies initialize the population of evolutionary algorithms with random genotypes. In practice, however, optimizers are typically seeded with good candidate solutions either previously known or created according to some…
The classic influence maximization problem finds a limited number of influential seed users in a social network such that the expected number of influenced users in the network, following an influence cascade model, is maximized. The…
Online social networks have become a crucial medium to disseminate the latest political, commercial, and social information. Users with high visibility are often selected as seeds to spread information and affect their adoption in target…
Information diffusion and virus propagation are fundamental processes taking place in networks. While it is often possible to directly observe when nodes become infected with a virus or adopt the information, observing individual…