Corelab Seminar
2010-2011
Paris Siminelakis (NTUA)
Pricing Strategies for Social Networks under Linear Influence Model
Abstract.
Social interaction has played a crucial role in shaping human civilization.
Nowadays, tecnhology and especially the Internet have revolutionized the way
people interact, as Social Networking becomes increasingly ingrained in our
social lives. This fact, for the first time, gives us the ability to have a clear
large scale acount of the social structure. The question for Science is:
"How can we utilize this knowledge?"
We study the problem of a single seller aiming to maximize his revenue by selling
a product over a Social Network, where there are only positive externalities.
We follow up on a work of Hartline, Mirrokni, Sundararajan, where a Uniform
Additive Model is considered and a class of strategies called Influence and Exploit
are introduced. We provide structural results and insights concerning the problem of
Revenue Maximization and Maximum Feedback Arc Set. We also generalize Influence and
Exploit strategies improving the approximation ratio for the symmetric
case. Furthermore, we provide fairly grounded heuristics that correlate the social
position of a buyer with the price to be offered and propose Local Search strategies.
Joint work With Dimitris Fotakis.
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