Corelab Seminar
2012-2013
Thodoris Lykouris (NTUA)
Competitve Diffusion in Networks
Abstract.
Nowadays, monopolies rarely show up as many companies compete for the crucial mass of most potential services. Moreover, the advent of the
Internet and the rapid growth of social networking facilitates the spread of information among the customers. Hence, when determining their
selling strategy, companies should take into account these interactions to evade getting overtaken by their competitors.
Such strategies might contain offering the product to some customers for free so that they can influence their friends
or even paying to attract their interest, either by bribing them or through advertisement. Another possible decision is
selling the product at a low price at first and later increasing the price, as new customers are rather more eager to pay for it.
In this presentation we will focus to the first class of those strategies, where the firms target some initial infulential
set of buyers in order to ensure greater eventual adoption. This is the first part of my thesis on "Competitve Diffusion and
Pricing under externalities".