The threshold model is widely used to study the propagation of opinions and technologies in social networks. In this model individuals adopt the new behavior based on how many neighbors have already chosen it. We study cascades under the threshold model ...

Crowdfunding is quickly emerging as an alternative to traditional methods of funding new products. In a crowdfunding campaign, a seller solicits financial contributions from a crowd, usually in the form of pre-buying an unrealized product, and commits ...

Sybil attacks, in which an adversary creates a large number of identities, present a formidable problem for the robustness of recommendation systems. One promising method of sybil detection is to use data from social network ties to implicitly infer ...

We study mechanisms for environments in which only some of the agents are directly connected to a mechanism designer and the other agents can participate in a mechanism only through the connected agents' referrals. Agents' network connections are ...

Exclusive social groups are ones in which the group members decide whether or not to admit a candidate to the group. Examples of exclusive social groups include academic departments and fraternal organizations. In the present paper we introduce an ...

Though deliberation is a critical component of democratic decision-making, existing deliberative processes do not scale to large groups of people. Motivated by this, we propose a model in which large-scale decision-making takes place through a sequence ...

In the on-line Explore & Exploit [E&E] literature, central to Machine Learning, a central planner is faced with a set of alternatives, each yielding some unknown reward. The planner's goal is to learn the optimal alternative as soon as possible, via ...