Multi-Winner Contests for Strategic Diffusion in Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-winner contest mechanism for strategic diffusion in social networks that is resistant to manipulation and encourages active participation, improving stakeholder influence and effort levels.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel multi-winner contests mechanism that is false-name-proof, individually rational, and respects budget and subgraph constraints, advancing the design of manipulation-resistant diffusion strategies.

Findings

Stakeholders can significantly increase participant efforts with proper contest design.

The MWC mechanism satisfies key properties like false-name-proofness and individual rationality.

Numerical experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.

Abstract

Strategic diffusion encourages participants to take active roles in promoting stakeholders' agendas by rewarding successful referrals. As social media continues to transform the way people communicate, strategic diffusion has become a powerful tool for stakeholders to influence people's decisions or behaviors for desired objectives. Existing reward mechanisms for strategic diffusion are usually either vulnerable to false-name attacks or not individually rational for participants that have made successful referrals. Here, we introduce a novel multi-winner contests (MWC) mechanism for strategic diffusion in social networks. The MWC mechanism satisfies several desirable properties, including false-name-proofness, individual rationality, budget constraint, monotonicity, and subgraph constraint. Numerical experiments on four real-world social network datasets demonstrate that stakeholders can significantly boost participants' aggregated efforts with proper design of competitions. Our work sheds light on how to design manipulation-resistant mechanisms with appropriate contests.