Paul Dütting
Ingmar Weber
ABSTRACT
Suppose you buy a new laptop and, simply because you like it so much, you recommend it to friends, encouraging them to purchase it as well. What would be an adequate price for the vendor of the laptop to pay for your recommendation?
Personal recommendations like this are of considerable commercial interest, but unlike in sponsored search auctions there can be no truthful prices. Despite this "lack of truthfulness" the vendor of the product might still decide to pay you for recommendation e.g. because she wants to (i) provide you with an additional incentive to actually recommend her or to (ii) increase your satisfaction and/or brand loyalty. This leads us to investigate a pricing scheme based on the Shapley value [5] that satisfies certain "axioms of fairness". We find that it is vulnerable to manipulations and show how to overcome these difficulties using the anonymity-proof Shapley value of [4].
- D. Arthur, R. Motwani, A. Sharma, and Y. Xu. Pricing strategies for viral marketing on social networks. In WINE'09, pages 101--112, 2009. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- J. J. Brown and P. H. Reingen. Social ties and word-of-mouth referral behavior. Journal of Consumer Research, 14(3):350--62, 1987.Google ScholarCross Ref
- J. L. Herlocker, J. A. Konstan, L. G. Terveen, and J. T. Riedl. Evaluating collaborative filtering recommender systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 22(1):5--53, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- N. Ohta, V. Conitzer, Y. Satoh, A. Iwasaki, and M. Yokoo. Anonymity-proof shapley value. Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pages 927--934, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- L. S. Shapley. Contributions to the Theory of Games II, chapter A Value for n-Person Games, pages 307--317. Princeton University Press, 1953.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- How much is your personal recommendation worth?
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