document: Optimal marketing strategies over social networks We discuss the use of social networks in implementing viral marketing strategies . While influence maximization has been studied in this context ( see Chapter 24 of ( 10 ) ) , we study revenue maximization , arguably , a more natural objective . In our model , a buyer 's decision to buy an item is influenced by the set of other buyers that own the item and the price at which the item is offered . We focus on algorithmic question of finding revenue maximizing marketing strategies . When the buyers are completely symmetric , we can find the optimal marketing strategy in polynomial time . In the general case , motivated by hardness results , we investigate approximation algorithms for this problem . We identify a family of strategies called influence-and-exploit strategies that are based on the following idea : Initially influence the population by giving the item for free to carefully a chosen set of buyers . Then extract revenue from the remaining buyers using a ` greedy ' pricing strategy . We first argue why such strategies are reasonable and then show how to use recently developed set-function maximization techniques to find the right set of buyers to influence .
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