[theory students] Opportunity for some theory?

[Eric Bach <bach@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I recently read Bridget Read's

Little Bosses Everywhere, about

multilevel marketing companies

(think Amway, Mary Kay,...).

The pitch to join up as an independent

distributor is that you can (say) recruit

two others to work under you, and each

of them can in return recruit two more,

and so on.

This sounds like another impossible

pyramid scheme with exponential

growth, but the companies Read

writes about claim they are not.

She cites one article, by Vander Nat

and Keep, J Public Policy and

Marketing, 2002,

that offers a mathematical

way to distinguish a legitimate MLM

from a pyramid scheme.

It does not seem very sophisticated, 

and to my mind something involving

random behavior like a branching

process might be more to the point.

This might make a good project for

a term paper or qual exam.

Eric

PS I have encountered probabilistic

models for pyramid schemes but

none survived the recent office move.