Fig. 1

Budgets where strategic seeding is relevant. When the budget for seeding, \(b\), is very low or very high, randomly chosen seed sets are competitive with strategically chosen seed sets. In the top panel, for node threshold \(\tau =0.4\), greedy seeding (shown in blue) outperforms random selection for \(b\in [5,27]\). Above \(b=28\) both methods give complete cascades (additional spending on seeding is wasted). In the bottom panel, for node threshold \(\tau =0.8\), greedy seeding outperforms random selection for \(b\in [12,75]\), but the additive advantage of greedy selection for \(b\le 28\) is extremely small