  In this article we study the allocation of a budget to promote an opinion in
a group of agents. We assume that their opinion dynamics are based on the
well-known voter model. We are interested in finding the most efficient use of
a budget over time in order to manipulate a social network. We address the
problem using the theory of discounted Markov decision processes. Our
contributions can be summarized as follows: (i) we introduce the discounted
Markov decision process in our cases, (ii) we present the corresponding Bellman
equations, and, (iii) we solve the Bellman equations via backward programming.
This work is a step towards providing a solid formulation of the budget
allocation in social networks.
