A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Rank-Order Mechanisms for User-Generated Content
Venue
Journal of Economic Theory, vol. 154 (2014), pp. 349-374
Publication Year
2014
Authors
Arpita Ghosh, Patrick Hummel
BibTeX
Abstract
We investigate the widely-used rank-order mechanism for displaying user-generated
content, where contributions are displayed on a webpage in decreasing order of
their ratings, in a game-theoretic model where strategic contributors benefit from
attention and have a cost to quality. We show that the lowest quality elicited by
this rank-order mechanism in any mixed-strategy equilibrium becomes optimal as the
available attention diverges. Additionally, these equilibrium qualities are higher,
with probability tending to 1 in the limit of diverging attention, than those
elicited by a more equitable proportional mechanism which distributes attention in
proportion to the positive ratings a contribution receives, but the proportional
mechanism elicits a greater number of contributions than the rank-order mechanism.
