Optimal influence under observational learning

Nikolas Tsakas

University of Cyprus Working Papers in Economics from University of Cyprus Department of Economics

Abstract: We study the optimal targeting problem of a firm that seeks to maximize the diffusion of a product in a society where agents learn from their neighbors. The firm can seed the product to a subset of the population and our goal is to find which is the optimal subset to target. We provide a condition that characterizes the optimal targeting strategy for any network structure. The key parameter in this condition is the agents' decay centrality, which takes into account how close an agent is to others, in a way that distant agents are weighted less than closer ones.

Keywords: Social Networks; Targeting; Diffusion; Observational Learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 D85 H23 M37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2015-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Optimal influence under observational learning (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucy:cypeua:10-2015

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