Keeping Up with the Winner! Targeted Advertisement to Communities in Social Networks

Abstract

When a new product enters a market already dominated by an existing product, will it survive along with this dominant product? Most of the existing works have shown the coexistence of two competing products spreading/being adopted on overlaid graphs with same set of users. However, when it comes to the survival of a weaker product on the same graph, it has been established that the stronger one dominates the market and wipes out the other. This paper makes a step towards narrowing this gap so that a new/weaker product can also survive along with its competitor with a positive market share. Specifically, we identify a locally optimal set of users to induce a community that is targeted with advertisement by the product launching company under a given budget constraint. To this end, we model the system as competing Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) epidemics and employ perturbation techniques to quantify and attain a positive market share in a cost-efficient manner. Our extensive simulation results with real-world graph dataset show that with our choice of target users, a new product can establish itself with positive market share, which otherwise would be dominated and eventually wiped out of the competitive market under the same budget constraint.