CATS-Oct-25-2013
Title[edit]
Scheduling a Cascade with Opposing Influences
Speaker[edit]
Anshul Sawant, University of Maryland
Abstract[edit]
Adoption or rejection of ideas, products, and technologies in a society is often governed by simultaneous propagation of positive and negative influences. Consider a planner trying to introduce an idea in different parts of a society at different times. How should the planner design a schedule considering this fact that positive reaction to the idea in early areas has a positive impact on probability of success in later areas, whereas a flopped reaction has exactly the opposite impact? We generalize a well-known economic model to study this situation, where the reaction of each area is determined by its initial preference and the reaction of early areas. We model the society by a graph where each node represents an a group of people with same preferences. We consider a full propagation setting where news and influences propagate between every two areas. We generalize previous works by studying the problem when people in different areas have differing behaviors.
