PROFIT MAXIMIZATION AND SOCIAL OPTIMUM WITH NETWORK EXTERNALITY*

Towards Profit Maximization for Online Social Network Providers

Online Social Networks (OSNs) attract billions of users to share information and communicate where viral marketing has emerged as a new way to promote the sales of products. An OSN provider is often hired by an advertiser to conduct viral marketing campaigns. The OSN provider generates revenue from the commission paid by the advertiser which is determined by the spread of its product informatio...

Social Welfare and Profit Maximization from Revealed Preferences

Consider the seller’s problem of finding “optimal” prices for her (divisible) goods when faced with a set of consumers, given that she can only observe their purchased bundles at set prices, i.e., access to only revealed preferences (demand oracle). We study both social welfare and profit maximization under this setting, assuming concave valuation function of consumers and convex production cos...

Profit maximization with bankruptcy and variable scale

In a diffusion model of an enterprise with variable scale, conditions are given for the maximization of ‘profit’ (expected total discounted withdrawals) to lead to bankruptcy almost surely. The optimal withdrawal policy is an ‘overflow policy’: the withdrawal rate is zero if the asset level is below a ‘barrier’, and equal to the maximum rate if the asset level is at least equal to the barrier. ...

Supply Chain Network Design Under Profit Maximization and Oligopolistic Competition

In this paper, we model the supply chain network design problem with oligopolistic firms who are involved in the competitive production, storage, and distribution of a homogeneous product to multiple demand markets. The profit-maximizing firms select both the capacities associated with the various supply chain network activities as well as the product quantities. We formulate the governing Nash...

Customer Selection and Profit Maximization