Social network learning efficiency in the principal-agent relationship

Under the bounded rationality assumption,a principal rarely provides an optimal contract to an agent.Learning from others is one way to improve such a contract.This paper studies the efficiency of social network learning(SNL)in the principal–agent framework.We first introduce the Cobb-Douglas production function into the classic Holmstrom and Milgrom(1987)model with a constant relative risk-averse agent and work out the theoretically optimal contract.Algorithms are then designed to model the SNL process based on profit gaps between contracts in a network of principals.Considering the uncertainty of the agent's labor output,we find that the principals can reach a consensus that tends to result in overcompensation compared to the optimal contract.Then,this study examines how network attributes and model parameters impact learning efficiency and posits several summative hypotheses.The simulation results validate these hypotheses,and we discuss the relevant economic implications of the observed changes in SNL efficiency.

Personal summarization from profile networks

Personal profile information on social media like LinkedIn.com and Facebook.com is at the core of many inter- esting applications, such as talent recommendation and con- textual advertising. However, personal profiles usually lack consistent organization confronted with the large amount of available information. Therefore, it is always a challenge for people to quickly find desired information from them. In this paper, we address the task of personal profile summarization by leveraging both textual information and social connection information in social networks from both unsupervised and supervised learning paradigms. Here, using social connec- tion information is motivated by the intuition that people with similar academic, business or social background （e.g., co- major, co-university, and co-corporation） tend to have similar experiences and should have similar summaries. For unsu- pervised learning, we propose a collective ranking approach, called SocialRank, to combine textual information in an in- dividual profile and social context information from relevant profiles in generating a personal profile summary. For super- vised learning, we propose a collective factor graph model, called CoFG, to summarize personal profiles with local tex- tual attribute functions and social connection factors. Exten- sive evaluation on a large dataset from LinkedIn.com demon- strates the usefulness of social connection information in per- sonal profile summarization and the effectiveness of our pro- posed unsupervised and supervised learning approaches.