9,838 research outputs found

    Maximizing Welfare in Social Networks under a Utility Driven Influence Diffusion Model

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    Motivated by applications such as viral marketing, the problem of influence maximization (IM) has been extensively studied in the literature. The goal is to select a small number of users to adopt an item such that it results in a large cascade of adoptions by others. Existing works have three key limitations. (1) They do not account for economic considerations of a user in buying/adopting items. (2) Most studies on multiple items focus on competition, with complementary items receiving limited attention. (3) For the network owner, maximizing social welfare is important to ensure customer loyalty, which is not addressed in prior work in the IM literature. In this paper, we address all three limitations and propose a novel model called UIC that combines utility-driven item adoption with influence propagation over networks. Focusing on the mutually complementary setting, we formulate the problem of social welfare maximization in this novel setting. We show that while the objective function is neither submodular nor supermodular, surprisingly a simple greedy allocation algorithm achieves a factor of (11/eϵ)(1-1/e-\epsilon) of the optimum expected social welfare. We develop \textsf{bundleGRD}, a scalable version of this approximation algorithm, and demonstrate, with comprehensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets, that it significantly outperforms all baselines.Comment: 33 page

    Managing a peer-to-peer backup system: does imposed fairness socially outperform a revenue-driven monopoly ?

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    International audienceWe study a peer-to-peer backup system, where users offer some of their storage space to provide service for the others. The economic model for such a system is different from the ones applicable to peer-to-peer file sharing systems, since the storage capacity is a private good here. We study two mechanisms aimed at incentivizing users to offer some of their capacity: a price-based scheme (here a revenue-driven monopoly) and a more classical symmetric scheme (imposing users to contribute to the service at least as much as use it). We compare the outcomes of such mechanisms to the socially optimal situation that could be attained if users were not selfish, and show that depending on user heterogeneity, a revenue maximizing monopoly can be a worse or a better (in terms of social welfare) way to manage the system than a symmetric scheme

    Microeconomics of Technology Adoption

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    There is an emerging consensus among macro-economists that differences in technology across countries accounts for the major differences in per-capita GDP and the wages of workers with similar skills across countries. Accounting for differences in technology levels across countries thus can go a long way towards understanding global inequality. One mechanism by which poorer countries can catch up with richer countries is through technological diffusion, the adoption by low-income countries of the advanced technologies produced in high-income countries. In this survey, we examine recent micro studies that focus on understanding the adoption process. If technological diffusion is a major channel by which poor countries can develop, it must be the case that technology adoption is incomplete or the inputs associated with the technologies are under-utilized in poor, or slow-growing economies. Thus, obtaining a better understanding of the constraints on adoption are useful in understanding a major component of growth.technology adoption, review
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