Date:
Location:
CRCS Lunch Seminar
Date: Monday, November 28, 2011
Time: 12:15pm – 1:45pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119
Speaker: Yuval Emek, ETH Zurich
Title: Mechanisms for Multi-Level Marketing
Abstract: Multi-level marketing is a marketing approach that motivates its participants to promote a certain product among their friends. The popularity of this approach increases due to the accessibility of modern social networks, however, it existed in one form or the other long before the Internet age began (the infamous Pyramid scheme that dates back at least a century is in fact a special case of multi-level marketing). In this talk we lay foundations for the study of reward mechanisms in multi-level marketing within social networks. We provide a set of desired properties for such mechanisms and show that they are uniquely satisfied by geometric reward mechanisms. The resilience of mechanisms to false-name manipulations is also considered; while geometric reward mechanisms fail against such manipulations, we exhibit other mechanisms which are false-name-proof. The talk will be self-contained.
Based on a joint work with Ron Karidi, Moshe Tennenholtz, and Aviv Zohar.
Short bio: Yuval Emek graduated summa cum laude from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) with a bachelor degree in computer science and completed his master studies and Ph.D. in computer science at the Weizmann Institute. Following that, he spent one year as a post-doc at Tel Aviv University and another year in Microsoft. He currently holds a post-doc position at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. In his scientific work, Yuval studies various aspects of complex distributed systems with an emphasis on the interaction between self-interested parties.