On the Effectiveness of Compact Strategies for Opinion Diffusion in Social Environments

An opinion diffusion scenario is considered where two marketers compete to diffuse their own opinions over a social network. In particular, they implement social proof marketing approaches that naturally give rise to a strategic setting, where it is crucial to find the appropriate order for targeting the individuals to which provide the incentives to adopt their opinions. The setting is extensively studied from the theoretical and empirical viewpoint, by considering strategies defined in a compact way, such as those that can be defined by selecting the individuals according to their degree of centrality in the underlying network. In addition to depicting a clear picture of the complexity issues arising in the setting, several compact strategies are empirically compared on real-world social networks. Results suggest that the effectiveness of compact strategies is moderately influenced by the characteristic of the network, with some centrality measures naturally emerging as good candidates to define heuristic approaches for marketing campaigns.