I examine the problem of maximizing the spread of information in a context where users of a network decide which piece of information is shared. A company thus provides initial information to some users and they then choose what to share to their neighbours. These actions of sharing and choosing produce the characteristics of word-of-mouth advertising over time. I then answer the two following questions: what is the best word-of-mouth campaign that the company can perform and second, what is the value of such a campaign? The optimal solution can be understood as a Nash Equilibria that maximizes the concentration of the initial information to a small group of users. Such solution contrasts with standard measures of user influence and I show that they can sometime be seriously misleading. I provide an exact solution for a wide class of generic network topologies and an algorithm to compute it in polynomial time.
QED Working Paper Number
1293
Keywords
Network Theory
Viral Communication
Word of Mouth Advertising
Working Paper