Project Title: A Game Theory Approach to Cascading Behavior in Networks
This project will study the rapid flow of information in large social networks. This is important in "viral marketing" and comes out of early work done on the spread of epidemics and social network theory. A graph is built with nodes representing individuals in a population and an edge between two nodes if they have some form of communication. Each node has a choice of two behaviors, an old behavior and a new behavior, and an incentive (payoff) for matching behaviors. Each node plays the coordinated game with each neighbor and the payoff for a node is the sum of the individual game payoffs. A sample problem is to determine the k most influential people in the network, an NP-hard problem. We seek variations on the model, such as weighting the edges with other payoffs (e.g., with marketing strategies of price reductions) to better determine the most influential players (often those to start marketing to).
Resources
- Influential Nodes in a Diffusion Model for Social Networks
Authors: David Kempe, Jon Kleinberg, Eva Tardos
- Diffusion on Social Networks
Author: Matthew O. Jackson
- Diffusion in Complex Social Networks
Author: Dunia Lopez-Pintado