Matching of Users and Creators in Two-Sided Markets with Departures

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Huttenlocher, Daniel, Li, Hannah, Lyu, Liang, Ozdaglar, Asuman, Siderius, James
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866913201885544448
author Huttenlocher, Daniel
Li, Hannah
Lyu, Liang
Ozdaglar, Asuman
Siderius, James
author_facet Huttenlocher, Daniel
Li, Hannah
Lyu, Liang
Ozdaglar, Asuman
Siderius, James
contents Many online platforms of today, including social media sites, are two-sided markets bridging content creators and users. Most of the existing literature on platform recommendation algorithms largely focuses on user preferences and decisions, and does not simultaneously address creator incentives. We propose a model of content recommendation that explicitly focuses on the dynamics of user-content matching, with the novel property that both users and creators may leave the platform permanently if they do not experience sufficient engagement. In our model, each player decides to participate at each time step based on utilities derived from the current match: users based on alignment of the recommended content with their preferences, and creators based on their audience size. We show that a user-centric greedy algorithm that does not consider creator departures can result in arbitrarily poor total engagement, relative to an algorithm that maximizes total engagement while accounting for two-sided departures. Moreover, in stark contrast to the case where only users or only creators leave the platform, we prove that with two-sided departures, approximating maximum total engagement within any constant factor is NP-hard. We present two practical algorithms, one with performance guarantees under mild assumptions on user preferences, and another that tends to outperform algorithms that ignore two-sided departures in practice.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_00313
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Matching of Users and Creators in Two-Sided Markets with Departures
Huttenlocher, Daniel
Li, Hannah
Lyu, Liang
Ozdaglar, Asuman
Siderius, James
Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
General Economics
Economics
Many online platforms of today, including social media sites, are two-sided markets bridging content creators and users. Most of the existing literature on platform recommendation algorithms largely focuses on user preferences and decisions, and does not simultaneously address creator incentives. We propose a model of content recommendation that explicitly focuses on the dynamics of user-content matching, with the novel property that both users and creators may leave the platform permanently if they do not experience sufficient engagement. In our model, each player decides to participate at each time step based on utilities derived from the current match: users based on alignment of the recommended content with their preferences, and creators based on their audience size. We show that a user-centric greedy algorithm that does not consider creator departures can result in arbitrarily poor total engagement, relative to an algorithm that maximizes total engagement while accounting for two-sided departures. Moreover, in stark contrast to the case where only users or only creators leave the platform, we prove that with two-sided departures, approximating maximum total engagement within any constant factor is NP-hard. We present two practical algorithms, one with performance guarantees under mild assumptions on user preferences, and another that tends to outperform algorithms that ignore two-sided departures in practice.
title Matching of Users and Creators in Two-Sided Markets with Departures
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
General Economics
Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.00313