Related papers: Clickbait vs. Quality: How Engagement-Based Optimi…

Online platforms have a wealth of data, run countless experiments and use industrial-scale algorithms to optimize user experience. Despite this, many users seem to regret the time they spend on these platforms. One possible explanation is…

We introduce a game-theoretic framework examining strategic interactions between a platform and its content creators in the presence of AI-generated content. Our model's main novelty is in capturing creators' dual strategic decisions: The…

Optimization is commonly employed to determine the content of web pages, such as to maximize conversions on landing pages or click-through rates on search engine result pages. Often the layout of these pages can be decoupled into several…

From media platforms to chatbots, algorithms shape how people interact, learn, and discover information. Such interactions between users and an algorithm often unfold over multiple steps, during which strategic users can guide the algorithm…

We consider in this paper competition of content creators in routing their content through various media. The routing decisions may correspond to the selection of a social network (e.g. twitter versus facebook or linkedin) or of a group…

We develop a model of content filtering as a game between the filter and the content consumer, where the latter incurs information costs for examining the content. Motivating examples include censoring misinformation, spam/phish filtering,…

Understanding the bias-variance tradeoff in user representation learning is essential for improving recommendation quality in modern content platforms. While well studied in static settings, this tradeoff becomes significantly more complex…

We study a game played between advertisers in an online ad platform. The platform sells ad impressions by first-price auction and provides autobidding algorithms that optimize bids on each advertiser's behalf, subject to advertiser…

Access to online contents represents a large share of the Internet traffic. Most such contents are multimedia items which are user-generated, i.e., posted online by the contents' owners. In this paper we focus on how those who provide…

Benchmark hacking refers to tuning a machine learning model to score highly on certain evaluation criteria without improving true generalization or faithfully solving the intended problem. We study this phenomenon in a generic machine…

In e-commerce platforms, sponsored and non-sponsored content are jointly displayed to users and both may interactively influence their engagement behavior. The former content helps advertisers achieve their marketing goals and provides a…

This paper develops a theoretical model to study the economic incentives for a social media platform to moderate user-generated content. We show that a self-interested platform can use content moderation as an effective marketing tool to…

Digital services face a fundamental trade-off in content selection: they must balance the immediate revenue gained from high-reward content against the long-term benefits of maintaining user engagement. Traditional multi-armed bandit models…

We study how a platform should design early exposure and rewards when creators strategically choose quality before release. A short testing window with a pass/fail bar induces a pass probability, the slope of which is the key sufficient…

Recommendation systems are pervasive in the digital economy. An important assumption in many deployed systems is that user consumption reflects user preferences in a static sense: users consume the content they like with no other…

We investigate the design of mechanisms to incentivize high quality in crowdsourcing environments with strategic agents, when entry is an endogenous, strategic choice. Modeling endogenous entry in crowdsourcing is important because there is…

Searching for medical information is both a common and important activity since it influences decisions people make about their healthcare. Using search engine optimization (SEO), content producers seek to increase the visibility of their…

In this paper, we study a strategic model of marketing and product consumption in social networks. We consider two firms in a market competing to maximize the consumption of their products. Firms have a limited budget which can be either…

The creator economy has revolutionized the way individuals can profit through online platforms. In this paper, we initiate the study of online learning in the creator economy by modeling the creator economy as a three-party game between the…

In this paper, we study a strategic model of marketing and product consumption in social networks. We consider two competing firms in a market providing two substitutable products with preset qualities. Agents choose their consumptions…