Maximal Information Propagation via Lotteries

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lottery-based free market mechanism that incentivizes maximal information propagation in social networks while satisfying key economic properties such as budget feasibility and incentive compatibility.

Contribution

It proposes a novel free market model with lotteries that naturally incentivizes maximum propagation and ensures desirable properties without complex reward schemes.

Findings

Participants are incentivized to propagate maximally.

The mechanism satisfies budget feasibility and incentive compatibility.

It automatically ensures properties like individual rationality and Sybil-proofness.

Abstract

Propagating information to more people through their friends is becoming an increasingly important technology used in domains such as blockchain, advertising, and social media. To incentivize people to broadcast the information, the designer may use a monetary rewarding scheme, which specifies who gets how much, to compensate for the propagation. Several properties are desirable for the rewarding scheme, such as budget feasible, individually rational, incentive compatible, and Sybil-proof. In this work, we design a free market with lotteries, where every participant can decide by herself how much of the reward she wants to withhold before propagating to others. We show that in the free market, the participants have a strong incentive to maximally propagate the information and all the above properties are satisfied automatically.