Surviving the Customer -- Zero-Sum Games in Traditional Marketing -- The Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Emergence of Cooperation -- Consumer Revolt and the Rising Cost of Defection -- Sustaining Marketer-Consumer Cooperation through Coordination Games -- Crowdsourcing and Schelling’s Theory of...

We introduce a simple two-stage game of endogenous network formation and information sharing for reasoning about the optimal design of social networks like Facebook or Google+. We distinguish between unilateral and bilateral connections and between targeted and collective information sharing....

It is well established in the literature that customer retention is at least as important as customer acquisition, especially in the freemium-based virtual economy, in which individuals are connected by multi-relational social networks, such as the “friendships” and “guilds” (virtual...