A Mutual Independent Cascade Model for Customer Behavior Propagation

Model of spreading behaviors, influences, new trends and innovations through social networks has been studied in a number of domains. These may include the diffusion of medical and technological innovations, the sudden and widespread adoption of strategies in game-theoretic settings, and the effects of word of mouth in the promotion of new products. One of the most important facts that is neglected in previous spread models is “considering cascading negative opinions”. This important fact shows that negative opinions may originate and propagate in populations as much as positive opinions and even they are stronger and more dominant. In this paper we propose a new model of influence cascade called Independent Cascade with Positive and Negative WOM (ICPN). ICPN models some important facts that people may encounter in a social environment. These facts include negativity bias, the asymmetric behavior of negative and positive WOM, and different types of consumer complaints behaviors. Moreover, the influence maximization problem is formulated in this model and also, we show that ICPN maintains submodularity in this problem. This fact allows a simple greedy approximation algorithm for maximizing the positive influence within a ratio of approximation.