Strategies for the Diffusion of Innovations on Social Networks

Floortje Alkemade () and Carolina Castaldi

Computational Economics, 2005, vol. 25, issue 1, 3-23

Abstract: We investigate the spread of innovations on a social network. The network consists of agents that are exposed to the introduction of a new product. Consumers decide whether or not to buy the product based on their own preferences and the decisions of their neighbors in the social network. We use and extend concepts from the literature on epidemics and herd behavior to study this problem. The central question of this paper is whether firms can learn about the network structure and consumer characteristics when only limited information is available, and use this information to evolve a successful directed-advertising strategy. In order to do so, we extend existing models to allow for heterogeneous agents and both positive and negative externalities. The firm can learn a directed-advertising strategy that takes into account both the topology of the social consumer network and the characteristics of the consumer. Such directed-advertising strategies outperform random advertising. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005

Keywords: agents; learning; heterogeneous agents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10614-005-6245-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:compec:v:25:y:2005:i:1:p:3-23

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ry/journal/10614/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10614-005-6245-1

Access Statistics for this article

Computational Economics is currently edited by Hans Amman

More articles in Computational Economics from Springer, Society for Computational Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().