Part of the success of social networks can be attributed to the “six degrees of separation’’ phenomena that means the distance between any two individuals in terms of direct personal relationships is relatively small. An equally important factor is there are limits to the amount and kinds of information a person is able or willing to make available to the public at large. For example, an expert...

Word-of-mouth, referral, or viral marketing is a highly sought-after way of advertising. In this paper, we investigate whether such marketing can be encouraged through incentive mechanisms, thus allowing an organisation to effectively crowdsource their marketing. Specifically, we undertake a field experiment that compares several mechanisms for incentivising social media shares in support of a ...

Referral systems have been proposed to assist people in finding potential experts in person-to-person social networks, in which each user is assigned a software agent and software agents help automate the process through a series of referrals. However, most of the existing referral systems have focused on the referral information generation, and simply consider referrals through path search in ...

detailed investigation would lead to no recommendations for change. At the other end of this wide spectrum is the possibility of professional malfeasance (see the paper by Graham Neale on p 14837), and even purposeful harmful acts are not impossible. Unlike the airline pilot, medical professionals do not share the fate of those in their care. Even if the patient dies because the hospital bums d...

Interpretation is difficult There are large differences in how often general practitioners refer patients to hospital.'14 These differences are attracting growing attention-partly from the Department of Health and Social Security, which is concerned to ensure the efficient use of resources, and partly from district health authorities, some of which have tried to save money by limiting referrals...