73,637 research outputs found
Modeling Adoption and Usage of Competing Products
The emergence and wide-spread use of online social networks has led to a
dramatic increase on the availability of social activity data. Importantly,
this data can be exploited to investigate, at a microscopic level, some of the
problems that have captured the attention of economists, marketers and
sociologists for decades, such as, e.g., product adoption, usage and
competition.
In this paper, we propose a continuous-time probabilistic model, based on
temporal point processes, for the adoption and frequency of use of competing
products, where the frequency of use of one product can be modulated by those
of others. This model allows us to efficiently simulate the adoption and
recurrent usages of competing products, and generate traces in which we can
easily recognize the effect of social influence, recency and competition. We
then develop an inference method to efficiently fit the model parameters by
solving a convex program. The problem decouples into a collection of smaller
subproblems, thus scaling easily to networks with hundred of thousands of
nodes. We validate our model over synthetic and real diffusion data gathered
from Twitter, and show that the proposed model does not only provides a good
fit to the data and more accurate predictions than alternatives but also
provides interpretable model parameters, which allow us to gain insights into
some of the factors driving product adoption and frequency of use
Correlated Cascades: Compete or Cooperate
In real world social networks, there are multiple cascades which are rarely
independent. They usually compete or cooperate with each other. Motivated by
the reinforcement theory in sociology we leverage the fact that adoption of a
user to any behavior is modeled by the aggregation of behaviors of its
neighbors. We use a multidimensional marked Hawkes process to model users
product adoption and consequently spread of cascades in social networks. The
resulting inference problem is proved to be convex and is solved in parallel by
using the barrier method. The advantage of the proposed model is twofold; it
models correlated cascades and also learns the latent diffusion network.
Experimental results on synthetic and two real datasets gathered from Twitter,
URL shortening and music streaming services, illustrate the superior
performance of the proposed model over the alternatives
An Integrated Framework for Competitive Multi-channel Marketing of Multi-featured Products
For any company, multiple channels are available for reaching a population in
order to market its products. Some of the most well-known channels are (a) mass
media advertisement, (b) recommendations using social advertisement, and (c)
viral marketing using social networks. The company would want to maximize its
reach while also accounting for simultaneous marketing of competing products,
where the product marketings may not be independent. In this direction, we
propose and analyze a multi-featured generalization of the classical linear
threshold model. We hence develop a framework for integrating the considered
marketing channels into the social network, and an approach for allocating
budget among these channels
Adoption as a Social Marker: Innovation Diffusion with Outgroup Aversion
Social identities are among the key factors driving behavior in complex
societies. Signals of social identity are known to influence individual
behaviors in the adoption of innovations. Yet the population-level consequences
of identity signaling on the diffusion of innovations are largely unknown. Here
we use both analytical and agent-based modeling to consider the spread of a
beneficial innovation in a structured population in which there exist two
groups who are averse to being mistaken for each other. We investigate the
dynamics of adoption and consider the role of structural factors such as
demographic skew and communication scale on population-level outcomes. We find
that outgroup aversion can lead to adoption being delayed or suppressed in one
group, and that population-wide underadoption is common. Comparing the two
models, we find that differential adoption can arise due to structural
constraints on information flow even in the absence of intrinsic between-group
differences in adoption rates. Further, we find that patterns of polarization
in adoption at both local and global scales depend on the details of
demographic organization and the scale of communication. This research has
particular relevance to widely beneficial but identity-relevant products and
behaviors, such as green technologies, where overall levels of adoption
determine the positive benefits that accrue to society at large.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figure
Modeling competition between two pharmaceutical drugs using innovation diffusion models
The study of competition among brands in a common category is an interesting
strategic issue for involved firms. Sales monitoring and prediction of
competitors' performance represent relevant tools for management. In the
pharmaceutical market, the diffusion of product knowledge plays a special role,
different from the role it plays in other competing fields. This latent feature
naturally affects the evolution of drugs' performances in terms of the number
of packages sold. In this paper, we propose an innovation diffusion model that
takes the spread of knowledge into account. We are motivated by the need of
modeling competition of two antidiabetic drugs in the Italian market.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOAS868 in the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
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