Related papers: Entry Barriers in Content Markets
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…
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…
The past decade has witnessed the flourishing of a new profession as media content creators, who rely on revenue streams from online content recommendation platforms. The reward mechanism employed by these platforms creates a competitive…
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…
Online content platforms commonly use engagement-based optimization when making recommendations. This encourages content creators to invest in quality, but also rewards gaming tricks such as clickbait. To understand the total impact on the…
Driven by the new economic opportunities created by the creator economy, an increasing number of content creators rely on and compete for revenue generated from online content recommendation platforms. This burgeoning competition reshapes…
The integration of AI Overviews into search engines enhances user experience but diverts traffic from content creators, potentially discouraging high-quality content creation and causing user attrition that undermines long-term search…
Content creators compete for user attention. Their reach crucially depends on algorithmic choices made by developers on online platforms. To maximize exposure, many creators adapt strategically, as evidenced by examples like the sprawling…
User-generated content can be distributed at a low cost using peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, but the free-rider problem hinders the utilization of P2P networks. In order to achieve an efficient use of P2P networks, we investigate fundamental…
Nowadays, rating systems play a crucial role in the attraction of customers for different services. However, as it is difficult to detect a fake rating, attackers can potentially impact the rating's aggregated score unfairly. This malicious…
We propose an incentive mechanism for the sponsored content provider market in which the communication of users can be represented by a graph and the private information of the users is assumed to have a continuous distribution function.…
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…
Online social networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube) provide a popular, cost-effective and scalable framework for sharing user-generated contents. This paper addresses the intrinsic incentive problems residing in social networks using a…
We study the impact of content moderation policies in online communities. In our theoretical model, a platform chooses a content moderation policy and individuals choose whether or not to participate in the community according to the…
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…
Online user-generated content platforms allocate billions of dollars of promotional traffic through algorithms in two-sided marketplaces. To evaluate updates to these algorithms, platforms frequently rely on creator-side randomized…
Many online platforms predominantly rank items by predicted user engagement. We believe that there is much unrealized potential in including non-engagement signals, which can improve outcomes both for platforms and for society as a whole.…
With an exploding global market and the recent introduction of online cash prize tournaments, fantasy sports contests are quickly becoming a central part of the social gaming and sports industries. For sports fans and online media…
Recent scholarly work has extensively examined the phenomenon of algorithmic collusion driven by AI-enabled pricing algorithms. However, online platforms commonly deploy recommender systems that influence how consumers discover and purchase…
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,…