Business Administration - Research Publications
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ItemThe Benefits of Social Influence in Optimized Cultural Markets(PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2015-04-01)Social influence has been shown to create significant unpredictability in cultural markets, providing one potential explanation why experts routinely fail at predicting commercial success of cultural products. As a result, social influence is often presented in a negative light. Here, we show the benefits of social influence for cultural markets. We present a policy that uses product quality, appeal, position bias and social influence to maximize expected profits in the market. Our computational experiments show that our profit-maximizing policy leverages social influence to produce significant performance benefits for the market, while our theoretical analysis proves that our policy outperforms in expectation any policy not displaying social signals. Our results contrast with earlier work which focused on showing the unpredictability and inequalities created by social influence. Not only do we show for the first time that, under our policy, dynamically showing consumers positive social signals increases the expected profit of the seller in cultural markets. We also show that, in reasonable settings, our profit-maximizing policy does not introduce significant unpredictability and identifies "blockbusters". Overall, these results shed new light on the nature of social influence and how it can be leveraged for the benefits of the market.
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ItemInterdependent scheduling games(AAAI Press / International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, 2016-01-01)We propose a model of interdependent scheduling games in which each player controls a set of services that they schedule independently. A player is free to schedule his own services at any time; however, each of these services only begins to accrue reward for the player when all predecessor services, which may or may not be controlled by the same player, have been activated. This model, where players have interdependent services, is motivated by the problems faced in planning and coordinating large-scale infrastructures, e.g., restoring electricity and gas to residents after a natural disaster or providing medical care in a crisis when different agencies are responsible for the delivery of staff, equipment, and medicine. We undertake a game-theoretic analysis of this setting and in particular consider the issues of welfare maximization, computing best responses, Nash dynamics, and existence and computation of Nash equilibria.
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ItemAsymptotic Optimality of Myopic Optimization in Trial-Offer Markets with Social Influence(AAAI Press / International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, 2016)We study dynamic trial-offer markets, in which participants first try a product and later decide whether to purchase it or not. In these markets, social influence and position biases have a greater effect on the decisions taken in the sampling stage than those in the buying stage. We consider a myopic policy that maximizes the market efficiency for each incoming participant, taking into account the inherent quality of products, position biases, and social influence. We prove that this myopic policy is optimal and predictable asymptotically.