Managers of new brands seek to leverage positive WOM and establish a critical mass of consumers who interact with their brands at social-network sites (SNS). Effective selection of "seeds" or influencers at SNS who will recommend the product and leverage the power of their social networks to...

We examine how word-of-mouth learning may lead to uniform and possibly inefficient actions in finite time among a network of agents. In our model, agents are identically informed a priori and observe network neighbors’ actions as well as the payoffs of some or all of those actions (a...