Mining the network value of customers
Proceedings of the seventh ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Maximizing the spread of influence through a social network
Proceedings of the ninth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Optimal marketing strategies over social networks
Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web
A class of mean field interaction models for computer and communication systems
Performance Evaluation
Pricing Strategies for Viral Marketing on Social Networks
WINE '09 Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics
Competitive influence maximization in social networks
WINE'07 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Internet and network economics
Scalable Influence Maximization in Social Networks under the Linear Threshold Model
ICDM '10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining
Limiting the spread of misinformation in social networks
Proceedings of the 20th international conference on World wide web
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We consider the problem of devising incentive strategies for viral marketing of a product. In particular, we assume that the seller can influence penetration of the product by offering two incentive programs: a) direct incentives to potential buyers (influence) and b) referral rewards for customers who influence potential buyers to make the purchase (exploit connections). The problem is to determine the optimal timing of these programs over a finite time horizon. In contrast to algorithmic perspective popular in the literature, we take a mean-field approach and formulate the problem as a continuous-time deterministic optimal control problem. We show that the optimal strategy for the seller has a simple structure and can take both forms, namely, influence-and-exploit and exploit-and-influence. We also show that in some cases it may optimal for the seller to deploy incentive programs mostly for low degree nodes. We support our theoretical results through numerical studies and provide practical insights by analyzing various scenarios.