Repetition-aware content placement in navigational networks

Arguably, the most effective technique to ensure wide adoption of a concept (or product) is by repeatedly exposing individuals to messages that reinforce the concept (or promote the product). Recognizing the role of repeated exposure to a message, in this paper we propose a novel framework for the effective placement of content: Given the navigational patterns of users in a network, e.g., web graph, hyperlinked corpus, or road network, and given a model of the relationship between content-adoption and frequency of exposition, we define the repetition-aware content-placement (RACP) problem as that of identifying the set of B nodes on which content should be placed so that the expected number of users adopting that content is maximized. The key contribution of our work is the introduction of memory into the navigation process, by making user conversion dependent on the number of her exposures to that content. This dependency is captured using a conversion model that is general enough to capture arbitrary dependencies. Our solution to this general problem builds upon the notion of absorbing random walks, which we extend appropriately in order to address the technicalities of our definitions. Although we show the RACP problem to be NP-hard, we propose a general and efficient algorithmic solution. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficacy and the efficiency of our methods in multiple real-world datasets obtained from different application domains.