Analyzing and increasing user engagement in online forums

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The project is a collaboration between the research team of Prof. Marbach at the University of Toronto and the company VerticalScope. Founded in 1999, VerticalScope is a privately held corporation headquartered in Toronto, Canada, that specializes in the acquisition and development of online forums. The goal of the project is to develop algorithms that allow VerticalScope to analyze and increase the user engagement in their online forums, as well as to analyze the user engagement/value of online forums that VerticalScope is interested in acquiring. To achieve this, the project will design and implement novel algorithms that are based on the mathematical models and results developed by the research team of Prof. Peter Marbach at the University of Toronto. The methodology for the development of models is a game-theoretic approach where it is assumed that each agent/node in the network decides on actions (such as which links to establish, which communities to join, and which content to post/read in each community) in order to maximize their own utility. We then use the concept of a Nash equilibrium to characterize the resulting network structure. The industry partner VerticalScope will provide access to real-life data on their online forums that will allow us to test/validate our models and modeling assumptions, as well as the resulting algorithms. The resulting algorithms will be implemented and tested on VerticalScope's platform under the guidance and supervision of VerticalScope's Data Science R&D team.