IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2305.11381.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Online Learning in a Creator Economy

Author

Listed:
  • Banghua Zhu
  • Sai Praneeth Karimireddy
  • Jiantao Jiao
  • Michael I. Jordan

Abstract

The creator economy has revolutionized the way individuals can profit through online platforms. In this paper, we initiate the study of online learning in the creator economy by modeling the creator economy as a three-party game between the users, platform, and content creators, with the platform interacting with the content creator under a principal-agent model through contracts to encourage better content. Additionally, the platform interacts with the users to recommend new content, receive an evaluation, and ultimately profit from the content, which can be modeled as a recommender system. Our study aims to explore how the platform can jointly optimize the contract and recommender system to maximize the utility in an online learning fashion. We primarily analyze and compare two families of contracts: return-based contracts and feature-based contracts. Return-based contracts pay the content creator a fraction of the reward the platform gains. In contrast, feature-based contracts pay the content creator based on the quality or features of the content, regardless of the reward the platform receives. We show that under smoothness assumptions, the joint optimization of return-based contracts and recommendation policy provides a regret $\Theta(T^{2/3})$. For the feature-based contract, we introduce a definition of intrinsic dimension $d$ to characterize the hardness of learning the contract and provide an upper bound on the regret $\mathcal{O}(T^{(d+1)/(d+2)})$. The upper bound is tight for the linear family.

Suggested Citation

  • Banghua Zhu & Sai Praneeth Karimireddy & Jiantao Jiao & Michael I. Jordan, 2023. "Online Learning in a Creator Economy," Papers 2305.11381, arXiv.org.
  • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2305.11381
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.11381
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hurwicz,Leonid & Reiter,Stanley, 2008. "Designing Economic Mechanisms," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521724104, October.
    2. Schram, Ryan, 2020. "The state of the creator economy," Journal of Brand Strategy, Henry Stewart Publications, vol. 9(2), pages 152-162, September.
    3. Schorfheide, Frank & Wolpin, Kenneth I., 2016. "To hold out or not to hold out," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(2), pages 332-345.
    4. Bernard Salanié, 2005. "The Economics of Contracts: A Primer, 2nd Edition," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262195259, April.
    5. Frank Schorfheide & Kenneth I. Wolpin, 2012. "On the Use of Holdout Samples for Model Selection," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(3), pages 477-481, May.
    6. Alon Cohen & Moran Koren & Argyrios Deligkas, 2018. "Learning Approximately Optimal Contracts," Papers 1811.06736, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2022.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Daniel Huttenlocher & Hannah Li & Liang Lyu & Asuman Ozdaglar & James Siderius, 2023. "Matching of Users and Creators in Two-Sided Markets with Departures," Papers 2401.00313, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2024.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Banghua Zhu & Stephen Bates & Zhuoran Yang & Yixin Wang & Jiantao Jiao & Michael I. Jordan, 2022. "The Sample Complexity of Online Contract Design," Papers 2211.05732, arXiv.org, revised May 2023.
    2. de Bresser, Jochem, 2021. "Evaluating the Accuracy of Counterfactuals The Role of Heterogeneous Expectations in Life Cycle Models," Other publications TiSEM a7e2b4d8-fed0-4e86-926f-d, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    3. de Bresser, Jochem, 2021. "Evaluating the Accuracy of Counterfactuals The Role of Heterogeneous Expectations in Life Cycle Models," Discussion Paper 2021-034, Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research.
    4. Maibom, Jonas, 2021. "The Danish Labor Market Experiments: Methods and Findings," Nationaløkonomisk tidsskrift, Nationaløkonomisk Forening, vol. 2021(1), pages 1-21.
    5. Sebastian Galiani & Juan Pantano, 2021. "Structural Models: Inception and Frontier," NBER Working Papers 28698, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Anja Schöttner & Veikko Thiele, 2010. "Promotion Tournaments and Individual Performance Pay," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 19(3), pages 699-731, September.
    7. Mehran Garmehi & Morteza Analoui & Mukaddim Pathan & Rajkumar Buyya, 2015. "An economic mechanism for request routing and resource allocation in hybrid CDN–P2P networks," International Journal of Network Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 25(6), pages 375-393, November.
    8. Jascha-Alexander Koch & Jens Lausen & Moritz Kohlhase, 2021. "Internalizing the externalities of overfunding: an agent-based model approach for analyzing the market dynamics on crowdfunding platforms," Journal of Business Economics, Springer, vol. 91(9), pages 1387-1430, November.
    9. Bauer, Johannes M., 2014. "Platforms, systems competition, and innovation: Reassessing the foundations of communications policy," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 38(8), pages 662-673.
    10. Dirk Helbing, 2013. "Economics 2.0: The Natural Step towards A Self-Regulating, Participatory Market Society," Papers 1305.4078, arXiv.org, revised Jun 2013.
    11. Masahiko Aoki, 2013. "Institutions as cognitive media between strategic interactions and individual beliefs," Chapters, in: Comparative Institutional Analysis, chapter 17, pages 298-312, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    12. Schorfheide, Frank & Wolpin, Kenneth I., 2016. "To hold out or not to hold out," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(2), pages 332-345.
    13. Antonio Merlo & Thomas R. Palfrey, 2018. "External validation of voter turnout models by concealed parameter recovery," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 176(1), pages 297-314, July.
    14. Emrah Arbak, 2017. "Identifying the provisioning policies of Belgian banks," Working Paper Research 326, National Bank of Belgium.
    15. R. de O. Cavalcanti & P. K. Monteiro, 2016. "Enriching information to prevent bank runs," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 62(3), pages 477-494, August.
    16. Laurence Jacquet & Etienne Lehmann, 2021. "Optimal Income Taxation with Composition Effects," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 19(2), pages 1299-1341.
    17. Ugur, Mehmet & Trushin, Eshref, 2018. "Asymmetric information and heterogeneous effects of R&D subsidies: evidence on R&D investment and employment of R&D personel," Greenwich Papers in Political Economy 21943, University of Greenwich, Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre.
    18. Ewens, Michael & Gorbenko, Alexander & Korteweg, Arthur, 2022. "Venture capital contracts," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 143(1), pages 131-158.
    19. Arvidsson, Sara, 2010. "Reducing asymmetric information with usage-based automobile insurance," Working Papers 2010:2, Swedish National Road & Transport Research Institute (VTI), revised 03 Feb 2011.
    20. Michael Moutoussis & Raymond J Dolan & Peter Dayan, 2016. "How People Use Social Information to Find out What to Want in the Paradigmatic Case of Inter-temporal Preferences," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(7), pages 1-17, July.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2305.11381. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.