Related papers: Entry Barriers in Content Markets
This paper develops a theoretical model of platform competition where user-generated content (UGC) quality arises endogenously from the composition of the user base. Users differ in their relative preferences for content quality and network…
E-Commerce challenges traditional approaches to assessing monopolistic practices due to the rapid rate of growth, rapid change in technology, difficulty in assessing market share for information products like web sites, and high degree of…
Meritocratic systems, from admissions to hiring, aim to impartially reward skill and effort. Yet persistent disparities across race, gender, and class challenge this ideal. Some attribute these gaps to structural inequality; others to…
Online platforms in the Internet Economy commonly incorporate recommender systems that recommend products (or "arms") to users (or "agents"). A key challenge in this domain arises from myopic agents who are naturally incentivized to exploit…
Generative model ecosystems increasingly operate as competitive multi-platform markets, where platforms strategically select models from a shared pool and users with heterogeneous preferences choose among them. Understanding how platforms…
Peer-To-Peer (P2P) networks are self-organizing, distributed systems, with no centralized authority or infrastructure. Because of the voluntary participation, the availability of resources in a P2P system can be highly variable and…
We consider designing reward schemes that incentivize agents to create high-quality content (e.g., videos, images, text, ideas). The problem is at the center of a real-world application where the goal is to optimize the overall quality of…
Search and recommendation ecosystems exhibit competition among content creators. This competition has been tackled in a variety of game-theoretic frameworks. Content creators generate documents with the aim of being recommended by a content…
Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing "the social fabric" (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the bottlenecks and biases of traditional…
This paper studies cooperative games where coalitions are formed online and the value generated by the grand coalition must be irrevocably distributed among the players at each timestep. We investigate the fundamental issue of strategic…
Algorithms that favor popular items are used to help us select among many choices, from engaging articles on a social media news feed to songs and books that others have purchased, and from top-raked search engine results to highly-cited…
Numerous forms of consumer-generated media (CGM), such as social networking services (SNS), are widely used. Their success relies on users' voluntary participation, often driven by psychological rewards like recognition and connection from…
Online platforms collect rich information about participants and then share some of this information back with them to improve market outcomes. In this paper we study the following information disclosure problem in two-sided markets: If a…
This paper outlines an incentive-driven and decentralized approach to verifying the veracity of digital content at scale. Widespread misinformation, an explosion in AI-generated content and reduced reliance on traditional news sources…
In content recommender systems such as TikTok and YouTube, the platform's recommendation algorithm shapes content producer incentives. Many platforms employ online learning, which generates intertemporal incentives, since content produced…
One natural constraint in the sponsored search advertising framework arises from the fact that there is a limit on the number of available slots, especially for the popular keywords, and as a result, a significant pool of advertisers are…
We study game-theoretic models for capturing participation in blockchain systems. Permissionless blockchains can be naturally viewed as games, where a set of potentially interested users is faced with the dilemma of whether to engage with…
In the past few years, there has been much work on incorporating fairness requirements into algorithmic rankers, with contributions coming from the data management, algorithms, information retrieval, and recommender systems communities. In…
Content creators compete for exposure on recommendation platforms, and such strategic behavior leads to a dynamic shift over the content distribution. However, how the creators' competition impacts user welfare and how the relevance-driven…
By filtering the content that users see, social media platforms have the ability to influence users' perceptions and decisions, from their dining choices to their voting preferences. This influence has drawn scrutiny, with many calling for…