Haifeng Xu (UChicago)- Rethinking Online Content Ecosystems through the Lens of Computational Economics

Abstract: Online contents not only are important to our life but also underlie the recent success of generative AIs (GenAIs) technology. In turn, GenAI is also revolutionizing the way contents are now created, which is much less costly, possibly even more creative, though depending on availability of human-created contents to sustainably refine GenAI’s model training. Such human-AI mutual dependence is fundamentally transforming existing content ecosystems. If not addressed properly, it may distort human creators’ incentives and even drive humans out of the ecosystem. In this talk, I will present our recent works on understanding content creation competitions through the lens of algorithmic economics, and how to design creator reward mechanisms to incentivize desirable distribution of created contents. Our designed mechanism not only enjoys nice theoretical properties, but also achieved promising efficiency during live tests with ~10 millions of users on Instagram Reels.