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Main Authors: Yao, Fan, Liao, Yiming, Wu, Mingzhe, Li, Chuanhao, Zhu, Yan, Yang, James, Wang, Qifan, Xu, Haifeng, Wang, Hongning
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.18319
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author Yao, Fan
Liao, Yiming
Wu, Mingzhe
Li, Chuanhao
Zhu, Yan
Yang, James
Wang, Qifan
Xu, Haifeng
Wang, Hongning
author_facet Yao, Fan
Liao, Yiming
Wu, Mingzhe
Li, Chuanhao
Zhu, Yan
Yang, James
Wang, Qifan
Xu, Haifeng
Wang, Hongning
contents 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 dynamics of content distribution and profoundly impacts long-term user welfare on the platform. However, the absence of a comprehensive picture of global user preference distribution often traps the competition, especially the creators, in states that yield sub-optimal user welfare. To encourage creators to best serve a broad user population with relevant content, it becomes the platform's responsibility to leverage its information advantage regarding user preference distribution to accurately signal creators. In this study, we perform system-side user welfare optimization under a competitive game setting among content creators. We propose an algorithmic solution for the platform, which dynamically computes a sequence of weights for each user based on their satisfaction of the recommended content. These weights are then utilized to design mechanisms that adjust the recommendation policy or the post-recommendation rewards, thereby influencing creators' content production strategies. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we report our findings from a series of experiments, including: 1. a proof-of-concept negative example illustrating how creators' strategies converge towards sub-optimal states without platform intervention; 2. offline experiments employing our proposed intervention mechanisms on diverse datasets; and 3. results from a three-week online experiment conducted on a leading short-video recommendation platform.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_18319
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle User Welfare Optimization in Recommender Systems with Competing Content Creators
Yao, Fan
Liao, Yiming
Wu, Mingzhe
Li, Chuanhao
Zhu, Yan
Yang, James
Wang, Qifan
Xu, Haifeng
Wang, Hongning
Information Retrieval
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 dynamics of content distribution and profoundly impacts long-term user welfare on the platform. However, the absence of a comprehensive picture of global user preference distribution often traps the competition, especially the creators, in states that yield sub-optimal user welfare. To encourage creators to best serve a broad user population with relevant content, it becomes the platform's responsibility to leverage its information advantage regarding user preference distribution to accurately signal creators. In this study, we perform system-side user welfare optimization under a competitive game setting among content creators. We propose an algorithmic solution for the platform, which dynamically computes a sequence of weights for each user based on their satisfaction of the recommended content. These weights are then utilized to design mechanisms that adjust the recommendation policy or the post-recommendation rewards, thereby influencing creators' content production strategies. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we report our findings from a series of experiments, including: 1. a proof-of-concept negative example illustrating how creators' strategies converge towards sub-optimal states without platform intervention; 2. offline experiments employing our proposed intervention mechanisms on diverse datasets; and 3. results from a three-week online experiment conducted on a leading short-video recommendation platform.
title User Welfare Optimization in Recommender Systems with Competing Content Creators
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.18319