Abstract
In the classic “influence-maximization” (IM) problem, people influence one another to adopt a product and the goal is to identify people to “seed” with the product so as to maximize long-term adoption. Many influence-maximization models suggest that, if the number of people who can be seeded is unconstrained, then it is optimal to seed everyone at the start of the IM process. In a recent paper, we argued that this is not necessarily the case for social products that people use to communicate with their friends (Iyer and Adamic, The costs of overambitious seeding of social products. In: International Workshop on Complex Networks and Their Applications_273–286, 2018). Through simulations of a model in which people repeatedly use such a product and update their rate of subsequent usage depending upon their satisfaction, we showed that overambitious seeding can result in people adopting in suboptimal contexts, having bad experiences, and abandoning the product before more favorable contexts for adoption arise. Here, we extend that earlier work by showing that the costs of overambitious seeding also appear in more traditional threshold models of collective behavior, once the possibility of permanent abandonment of the product is introduced. We further demonstrate that these costs can be mitigated by using conservative seeding approaches besides those that we explored in the earlier paper. Synthesizing these results with other recent work in this area, we identify general principles for when overambitious seeding can be of concern in the deployment of social products.
Highlights
The study of how new ideas and products spread through networks dates back decades, to early studies from the 1950s and 1960s of the adoption of health innovations (Coleman et al 1957; 1959; 1966) and to the development of general models of product adoption by Rogers and Bass (Rogers 1962; Bass 1969)
We have proposed some general principles around when the possibility of overambitious seeding ought to be considered: 1 Overambitious seeding is a concern whenever early adoption can result in the premature exhaustion of a resource for future spreading that would be better delayed to a more favorable context for that spreading
We have excluded these effects to make the case that overambitious seeding can be detrimental in the context of social products, even if none of these factors are at play
Summary
The study of how new ideas and products spread through networks dates back decades, to early studies from the 1950s and 1960s of the adoption of health innovations (Coleman et al 1957; 1959; 1966) and to the development of general models of product adoption by Rogers and Bass (Rogers 1962; Bass 1969). This is because these models can be mapped to their progressive counterparts on a temporal network in which people are represented by a node in each temporal layer, and there are links between each person i at time t and their friends at time t − 11 (Kempe et al 2003) This argument for monotonicity does not work if the original progressive model is itself non-monotonic, or if people abandon the product permanently after a fixed number of adoptions. A key point of our earlier paper was that taking into account these product experiences naturally leads to the emergence of costs of overambitious seeding, even in the absence of negative payouts of rejection, negative word-of-mouth, and non-conformism effects We made this point in a model that is rather structurally different from classic models of IM (Iyer and Adamic 2018).
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