Related papers: Entry Barriers in Content Markets
Incentive mechanisms for crowdsourcing have been extensively studied under the framework of all-pay auctions. Along a distinct line, this paper proposes to use Tullock contests as an alternative tool to design incentive mechanisms for…
We study the design of effort-maximizing grading schemes between agents with private abilities. Assuming agents derive value from the information their grade reveals about their ability, we find that more informative grading schemes induce…
Ranking, recommendation, and retrieval systems are widely used in online platforms and other societal systems, including e-commerce, media-streaming, admissions, gig platforms, and hiring. In the recent past, a large "fair ranking" research…
Online communities are constantly growing, with dozens of platforms housing millions of users. Large and small communities alike rely on volunteer moderators to maintain order. Despite their key role, moderators are given a toolbox of…
Institutions and investors face the constant challenge of making accurate decisions and predictions regarding how best they should distribute their endowments. The problem of achieving an optimal outcome at minimal cost has been extensively…
Ranking functions that are used in decision systems often produce disparate results for different populations because of bias in the underlying data. Addressing, and compensating for, these disparate outcomes is a critical problem for fair…
We consider a setting where goods are allocated to agents by way of an allocation platform (e.g., a matching platform). An ``allocation facilitator'' aims to increase the overall utility/social-good of the allocation by encouraging (some of…
The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going through a period of great expectations, introducing a certain level of anxiety in research, business and also policy. This anxiety is further energised by an AI race narrative that makes…
Research has established increased engagement and positive behavioral, attitudinal, and learning outcomes from educational games. Although engagement begets these benefits, there is a lack of research on how students engage with educational…
To incentivize users' participations and steer their online activities, online social networks start to provide users with various kinds of rewards for their contributions to the sites. The most frequently distributed rewards include…
Major online platforms today can be thought of as two-sided markets with producers and customers of goods and services. There have been concerns that over-emphasis on customer satisfaction by the platforms may affect the well-being of the…
Social media platforms have diverse content moderation policies, with many prominent actors hesitant to impose strict regulations. A key reason for this reluctance could be the competitive advantage that comes with lax regulation. A popular…
Matching markets face increasing needs to learn the matching qualities between demand and supply for effective design of matching policies. In practice, the matching rewards are high-dimensional due to the growing diversity of participants.…
Online bidding serves as a fundamental information system in mobile ecosystems, facilitating real-time ad allocation across billions of devices while optimizing both platform performance and user experience through data-driven decision…
Prior research has proposed technical solutions to use peer-to-peer (P2P) content delivery to serve Internet video, showing that it can reduce costs to content providers. Yet, such methods have not become widespread except for a few niche…
In a market system, regulations are designed to prevent or rectify market failures that inhibit fair exchange, such as monopoly or transactions with hidden costs. Because regulations reduce profits to those possessing unfair advantage,…
Today, many companies take advantage of viral marketing to promote their new products, and since there are several competing companies in many markets, Competitive Influence Maximization has attracted much attention. Two categories of…
Flagging mechanisms on social media platforms allow users to report inappropriate posts/accounts for review by content moderators. These reports are pivotal to platforms' efforts toward regulating norm violations. This paper examines how…
Modern content platforms offer paid promotion to mitigate cold start by allocating exposure via auctions. Our empirical analysis reveals a counterintuitive flaw in this paradigm: while promotion rescues low-to-medium quality content, it can…
Stack Overflow incentive system awards users with reputation scores to ensure quality. The decentralized nature of the forum may make the incentive system prone to manipulation. This paper offers, for the first time, a comprehensive study…