Capability and Responsibility Balancing in Online Social Search

Online social search (OSS) brings forth a new way to harness the Internet for answers. In this paper, we study the balancing between OSS users´ capabilities and responsibilities. Targeting a practical system design, we propose an analytical model that captures the heterogeneity of different referral sessions in OSS, and a distributed socio-aware referral strategy that can achieve the desired balance when the system reaches steady state. We show that configuring the strategy enables the system operator to control the flow of all posed questions in the system. We also discuss the implications of configuring the strategy from a gaming-strategy point of view.