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UID:www.tcs.tifr.res.in/event/1682
DTSTAMP:20260421T061751Z
SUMMARY:Likes\, Budgets\, and Equilibria: Designing Contests for Socially O
 ptimal Advertising
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Swaprava Nath (IIT Bombay)\n\nAbstract: \nFirms (busin
 esses\, service providers\, entertainment organizations\, political partie
 s\, etc.) advertise on social networks to draw people's attention and impr
 ove their awareness of the brands of the firms. In all such cases\, the co
 mpetitive nature of their engagements gives rise to a game where the firms
  need to decide how to distribute their budget over the consumers on a net
 work to maximize their brand's awareness. The firms (players) need to opti
 mize the budget allocation to the vertices (consumers) of the network so t
 hat the spread improves via direct (e.g.\, advertisements or free promotio
 nal offers) and indirect marketing (e.g.\, word-of-mouth). We propose a tw
 o-timescale model of decisions\, where communication between vertices occu
 rs on a faster timescale and the strategy update of firms occurs on a slow
 er timescale. We show that under fairly standard conditions\, the best res
 ponse dynamics of the firms converge to a pure strategy Nash equilibrium. 
 However\, such equilibria can be away from a socially optimal one. We prov
 ide a characterization of the contest success functions and provide exampl
 es for the designers of such contests (e.g.\, regulators\, social network 
 providers\, etc.) such that the Nash equilibrium becomes unique and social
  welfare maximizing. Our experiments show that for realistic scenarios\, s
 uch contest success functions perform fairly well.\nThis is a joint work w
 ith Sayantika Mandal and Harman Agarwal.\nShort bio: Swaprava is a faculty
  member in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bomba
 y\, and an associated faculty member of the Centre for Machine Intelligenc
 e and Data Science (CMInDS) and the IIT Bombay Trust Lab. He is the foundi
 ng faculty member of the Computational Economics Group (CompEcon) at IIT B
 ombay\, and previously served as a faculty member at IIT Kanpur. He has he
 ld postdoctoral positions at Carnegie Mellon University and the Indian Sta
 tistical Institute\, New Delhi\, and received his PhD from the Indian Inst
 itute of Science\, Bangalore. His research lies at the intersection of eco
 nomics and computation\, with applications to Internet economics\, auction
 s\, matching markets\, resource allocation\, crowdsourcing\, online advert
 ising\, and social networks.\n
URL:https://www.tcs.tifr.res.in/web/events/1682
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Kolkata:20260505T160000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Kolkata:20260505T170000
LOCATION:A-201 (STCS Seminar Room)
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