Just a Few Seeds More: Value of Network Information for Diffusion

Mohammad Akbarpour, Suraj Malladi and Amin Saberi
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Mohammad Akbarpour: Stanford U
Suraj Malladi: Stanford U
Amin Saberi: Stanford U

Research Papers from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business

Abstract: Identifying the optimal set of individuals to first receive information ('seeds') in a social network is a widely-studied question in many settings, such as the diffusion of information, microfinance programs, and new technologies. Numerous studies have proposed various network-centrality based heuristics to choose seeds in a way that is likely to boost diffusion. Here we show that, for some frequently studied diffusion processes, randomly seeding s plus x individuals can prompt a larger cascade than optimally targeting the best s individuals, for a small x. We prove our results for large classes of random networks, but also show that they hold in simulations over several real-world networks. This suggests that the returns to collecting and analyzing network information to identify the optimal seeds may not be economically significant. Given these findings, practitioners interested in communicating a message to a large number of people may wish to compare the cost of network-based targeting to that of slightly expanding initial outreach.

JEL-codes: D83 D85 O12 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mfd, nep-net, nep-soc and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecl:stabus:3678

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