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Article
Niche-Seeking in Influence Maximization with Adversary
ICEC '12: 14th Annual International Conference on Electronic Commerce, Singapore, 7-8 August 2012
  • Long Foong LIOW, Singapore Management University
  • Shih-Fen CHENG, Singapore Management University
  • Hoong Chuin LAU, Singapore Management University
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
submittedVersion
Publication Date
8-2012
Abstract

In hotly contested product categories dominated by a few powerful firms, it is quite common for weaker or late entrants to focus only on particular segments of the whole market. The rationale for such strategy is intuitive: to avoid direct confrontation with heavy-weight firms, and to concentrate in segments where these weaker firms have comparative advantages. In marketing, this is what people called “go niche or go home". The niche-building strategy may rely on “homophily", which implies that consumers in a particular market segment might possess certain set of attributes that cause them to appreciate certain products better (in other words, weaker firms would customize their products to target some particular market segments and not the mass market). On the other hand, the niche-building strategy may also rely on the network effect, which implies that consumers having social relationship would reinforce each other via their respective adoptions. In this case, weaker firms should recognize such inter-customer network and concentrate only on customers belonging to certain set of strategic clusters. In this paper, we present the model for building effective niche-seeking strategies. For simplicity, we assume that the adoption choice depends only on the network effects (in other words, a customer will choose the product that is chosen by the majority of her neighbor). The social network is directed, and there will be two firms, one with significantly more marketing budget than the other firm. Firms take turns making investment choices on which customer to convert. For both firms, their budgets are fixed over time and unused budget will not carry over to future time periods. With this model, we manage to show that a simple strategy based on the evaluation of individual customer's “value" can effectively identify and secure niches within randomly generated scale-free networks. We also show that such niche-building strategy indeed performs better in the long run than a myopic strategy that only cares about immediate market gains.

Discipline
ISBN
9781450311977
Identifier
10.1145/2346536.2346556
Publisher
ACM
City or Country
Singapore
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2346536.2346556
Citation Information
Long Foong LIOW, Shih-Fen CHENG and Hoong Chuin LAU. "Niche-Seeking in Influence Maximization with Adversary" ICEC '12: 14th Annual International Conference on Electronic Commerce, Singapore, 7-8 August 2012 (2012) p. 107 - 112
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/sfcheng/5/