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Optimizing budget allocation among channels and influencers

Published: 16 April 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Brands and agencies use marketing as a tool to influence customers. One of the major decisions in a marketing plan deals with the allocation of a given budget among media channels in order to maximize the impact on a set of potential customers. A similar situation occurs in a social network, where a marketing budget needs to be distributed among a set of potential influencers in a way that provides high-impact.
We introduce several probabilistic models to capture the above scenarios. The common setting of these models consists of a bipartite graph of source and target nodes. The objective is to allocate a fixed budget among the source nodes to maximize the expected number of influenced target nodes. The concrete way in which source nodes influence target nodes depends on the underlying model. We primarily consider two models: a source-side influence model, in which a source node that is allocated a budget of k makes k independent trials to influence each of its neighboring target nodes, and a target-side influence model, in which a target node becomes influenced according to a specified rule that depends on the overall budget allocated to its neighbors. Our main results are an optimal (1-1/e)-approximation algorithm for the source-side model, and several inapproximability results for the target-side model, establishing that influence maximization in the latter model is provably harder.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    WWW '12: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
    April 2012
    1078 pages
    ISBN:9781450312295
    DOI:10.1145/2187836
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 16 April 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. approximation algorithms
    2. budget allocation
    3. influence models

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    WWW 2012
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    • Univ. de Lyon
    WWW 2012: 21st World Wide Web Conference 2012
    April 16 - 20, 2012
    Lyon, France

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