Consensus, contagion and product adoption in social networks / Arastoo Fazeli Neishabour.

Format:

Book

Manuscript

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Fazeli Neishabour, Arastoo, author.

Contributor:

Jadbabaie, Ali, degree supervisor, degree committee member.

Pappas, George J., degree committee member.

Ribeiro, Alejandro, degree committee member.

Preciado, Victor, degree committee member.

Shamma, Jeff, degree committee member.

University of Pennsylvania. Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Penn dissertations--Electrical and systems engineering.

Electrical and systems engineering--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--Electrical and systems engineering.

Electrical and systems engineering--Penn dissertations.

Physical Description:

ix, 136 leaves ; 29 cm

Production:

[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] : University of Pennsylvania, 2015.

Summary:

In this thesis, we study the problem of agreement and consensus in time-varying networks, and investigate how the information about the individuals' purchasing decisions can be utilized by firms to maximize the spread of their product in social networks. The main contributions of this thesis are development of suite of new theorems for consensus in correlated random networks and to explicitly study the tradeoff between investing on the quality of a product versus initially seeding it with people in a social network. More specifically, we generalize the existing results on consensus in random networks to two new categories of random processes: The first category is any random process for which the sequence of random graphs converges to a random limit almost surely. The second category is exchangeable graph processes. For these classes of random processes we show that consensus is reached almost surely if and only if a weak notion of connectivity holds in conditional expectation. Next, we propose and analyze a strategic model of product consumption in social networks. We consider two firms in a market competing to maximize the spread of their products. Firms have a budget that they can allocate between the quality and initial seeding of the product in the network. After the decision of firms, agents choose their consumptions following a myopic best response dynamics. We characterize the Nash equilibrium of the game between firms and study the effect of the budgets as well as the network structure on the optimal allocation. As a practical extension, we then consider a case where products have some preset qualities that can be only improved marginally. We show that the optimal budget allocation in this case simplifies to a threshold strategy. In an alternative scenario, we study a strategic model of product adoption. Agents switch from one product to the other one with some probability depending on the choices of their neighbors and the qualities of products. We formulate the game between firms and derive similar results to the product consumption setup. Finally, we study a duopoly pricing problem. Our model consists of two stages. In the first stage firms set prices and in the second stage agents decide on consumptions. We characterize the Nash equilibrium of the both stages and describe their properties.

Notes:

Ph. D. University of Pennsylvania 2015.

Department: Electrical and Systems Engineering.

Supervisor: Ali Jadbabaie.

Includes bibliographical references.

OCLC:

950747205