On the approximability of influence in social networks
Proceedings of the nineteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Technology Diffusion in Social Networks
SOFSEM '09 Proceedings of the 35th Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science
Agent-based modeling for the study of diffusion dynamics
SpringSim '09 Proceedings of the 2009 Spring Simulation Multiconference
Nudging Mechanisms for Technology Adoption
WINE '09 Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics
A note on competitive diffusion through social networks
Information Processing Letters
Evolution of two-sided markets
Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Web search and data mining
Minimizing the expected complete influence time of a social network
Information Sciences: an International Journal
Allerton'09 Proceedings of the 47th annual Allerton conference on Communication, control, and computing
Diffusion in social networks with competing products
SAGT'11 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Algorithmic game theory
Understanding cyclic trends in social choices
Proceedings of the fifth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining
On the non-progressive spread of influence through social networks
LATIN'12 Proceedings of the 10th Latin American international conference on Theoretical Informatics
A game-theoretic analysis of a competitive diffusion process over social networks
WINE'12 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Internet and Network Economics
Choosing products in social networks
WINE'12 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Internet and Network Economics
Information cascade at group scale
Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Diffusion dynamics of network technologies with bounded rational users: aspiration-based learning
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
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In many settings, competing technologies -- for example, operating systems, instant messenger systems, or document formats -- can be seen adopting a limited amount of compatibility with one another; in other words, the difficulty in using multiple technologies is balanced somewhere between the two extremes of impossibility and effortless interoperability. There are a range of reasons why this phenomenon occurs, many of which -- based on legal, social, or business considerations -- seem to defy concise mathematical models. Despite this, we show that the advantages of limited compatibility can arise in a very simple model of diffusion in social networks, thus offering a basic explanation for this phenomenon in purely strategic terms. Our approach builds on work on the diffusion of innovations in the economics literature, which seeks to model how a new technology A might spread through a social network of individuals who are currently users of technology B. We consider several ways of capturing the compatibility of A and B, focusing primarily on a model in which users can choose to adopt A, adopt B, or -- at an extra cost -- adopt both A and B. We characterize how the ability of A to spread depends on both its quality relative to B, and also this additional cost of adopting both, and find some surprising non-monotonicity properties in the dependence on these parameters: in some cases, for one technology to survive the introduction of another, the cost of adopting both technologies must be balanced within a narrow, intermediate range. We also extend the framework to the case of multiple technologies, where we find that a simple model captures the phenomenon of two firms adopting a limited "strategic alliance" to defend against a new, third technology.