Mittagsseminar (by J. Lengler, K. Bringmann, B. Gärtner, M. Hoffmann, R. Kyng, D.Steurer, V. Traub)

Date and Time: Tuesday, March 18, 2025, 12:15 pm

Duration: 30 minutes

Location: OAT S15

Speaker: Ahad Zehmakan (Australian National University)

Viral Marketing in Social Networks with Competing Products

Consider a directed graph where each node is either red (using the red product), blue (using the blue product), or uncolored (undecided). Then in each round, an uncolored node chooses red (resp. blue) with some probability proportional to the number of its red (resp. blue) out-neighbors. What is the best strategy to maximize the expected final number of red nodes given the budget to select k red seed nodes? After proving that this problem is "computationally hard", we provide a polynomial time approximation algorithm with the best possible approximation guarantee, building on the monotonicity and submodularity of the objective function. Additionally, we discuss the convergence time of the aforementioned process and prove several tight bounds in terms of different graph parameters.

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