Reviews: Multistage Campaigning in Social Networks

The theoretical contributions (relationship between time-dependent exogenous intensity to average activity) appear significant, and the use of this result to derive a closed-form control algorithm appears to be a contribution to the field of shaping activities in social (and other) networks modeled as multivariate Hawkes processes. Regarding the clarity of this paper: The paper does not frame itself relative to prior work clearly. Clearly indicating where and how this work is a generalization of prior work [8] would improve clarity of the paper, and highlight the core contribution of handling *time-dependent* exogenous events. Stating that the paper "establishes theoretical foundations of optimal campaigning over social networks where user activities are modeled as multivariate Hawkes processes" does not properly localize the work relative to [8]. This could be improved in part by mentioning [8] in the introduction, and specifically stating that prior work has done optimal control with constant exogenous control, and that this paper addresses multi-stage exogenous intensity.