Arpita Ghosh
ABSTRACT
We model the economics of incentivizing high-quality user generated content (UGC), motivated by settings such as online review forums, question-answer sites, and comments on news articles and blogs. We provide a game-theoretic model within which to study the problem of incentivizing high quality UGC, in which contributors are strategic and motivated by exposure. Our model has the feature that both the quality of contributions as well as the extent of participation is determined endogenously in a free-entry Nash equilibrium.
The model predicts, as observed in practice, that if exposure is independent of quality, there will be a flood of low quality contributions in equilibrium. An ideal mechanism in this context would elicit both high quality and high participation in equilibrium, with near-optimal quality as the available attention diverges, and should be easily implementable in practice. We consider a very simple elimination mechanism, which subjects each contribution to rating by some number A of viewers, and eliminates any contributions that are not uniformly rated positively. We construct and analyze free-entry Nash equilibria for this mechanism, and show that A can be chosen to achieve quality that tends to optimal, along with diverging participation, as the number of viewers diverges.
- E. Friedman, P. Resnick, R. Sami, Manipulation-Resistant Reputation Systems, Algorithmic Game Theory, Cambridge University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
- Y. Chen, S. Jain, D. Parkes, Designing Incentives for Online Question and Answer Forums, ACM EC, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Jain, D. Parkes, The Role of Game Theory in Human Computation Systems (Position Paper), HCOMP 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Jain, D. Parkes, A Game-Theoretic Analysis of the ESP Game, Working Paper.Google Scholar
- A. Jøsang, R. Ismail, C. Boyd, A Survey of Trust and Reputation Systems for Online Service Provision, Decision Support Systems, 43(2), 618--644, March 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- K. Ling, G. Beenen, X. Wang, K. Chang, D. Frankowski, P. Resnick, R. Kraut, Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 10(4), 2005.Google ScholarCross Ref
- S. Rafaeli, Y. Ariel, Online Motivational Factors: Incentives for Participation and Contribution in Wikipedia, Psychological Aspects of Cyberspace, Cambridge University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Recommendations
A game-theoretic analysis of rank-order mechanisms for user-generated content
EC '11: Proceedings of the 12th ACM conference on Electronic commerceMany websites rank user-generated content (UGC) using viewer votes, displaying higher quality contributions more prominently and suppressing lower quality ones. Such an allocation of attention constitutes a mechanism, which can influence the quality of ...
Learning and incentives in user-generated content: multi-armed bandits with endogenous arms
ITCS '13: Proceedings of the 4th conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer ScienceMotivated by the problem of learning the qualities of user-generated content on the Web, we study a multi-armed bandit problem where the number and success probabilities of the arms of the bandit are endogenously determined by strategic agents in ...
Crowdsourcing with endogenous entry
WWW '12: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide WebWe investigate the design of mechanisms to incentivize high quality outcomes in crowdsourcing environments with strategic agents, when entry is an endogenous, strategic choice. Modeling endogenous entry in crowdsourcing markets is important because ...
Comments