Selling Multiple Items via Social Networks
This addresses the challenge of efficient item promotion in social networks for sellers, offering a guaranteed revenue improvement over traditional methods.
The paper tackles the problem of selling multiple items in a social network by designing a promotion mechanism that incentivizes buyers to invite neighbors, ensuring the seller's revenue improves without payment if advertising is not beneficial.
We consider a market where a seller sells multiple units of a commodity in a social network. Each node/buyer in the social network can only directly communicate with her neighbours, i.e. the seller can only sell the commodity to her neighbours if she could not find a way to inform other buyers. In this paper, we design a novel promotion mechanism that incentivizes all buyers, who are aware of the sale, to invite all their neighbours to join the sale, even though there is no guarantee that their efforts will be paid. While traditional sale promotions such as sponsored search auctions cannot guarantee a positive return for the advertiser (the seller), our mechanism guarantees that the seller's revenue is better than not using the advertising. More importantly, the seller does not need to pay if the advertising is not beneficial to her.