PPA-Game: Characterizing and Learning Competitive Dynamics Among Online Content Creators
This addresses competition dynamics in online recommender systems for content creators, but it is incremental as it builds on existing game theory and bandit frameworks.
The paper introduces the Proportional Payoff Allocation Game (PPA-Game) to model competition among online content creators for divisible resources like consumer attention, showing that pure Nash equilibria exist in most scenarios and proposing an online learning algorithm with regret bounded by O(log^{1+η} T).
In this paper, we present the Proportional Payoff Allocation Game (PPA-Game), which characterizes situations where agents compete for divisible resources. In the PPA-game, agents select from available resources, and their payoffs are proportionately determined based on heterogeneous weights attributed to them. Such dynamics simulate content creators on online recommender systems like YouTube and TikTok, who compete for finite consumer attention, with content exposure reliant on inherent and distinct quality. We first conduct a game-theoretical analysis of the PPA-Game. While the PPA-Game does not always guarantee the existence of a pure Nash equilibrium (PNE), we identify prevalent scenarios ensuring its existence. Simulated experiments further prove that the cases where PNE does not exist rarely happen. Beyond analyzing static payoffs, we further discuss the agents' online learning about resource payoffs by integrating a multi-player multi-armed bandit framework. We propose an online algorithm facilitating each agent's maximization of cumulative payoffs over $T$ rounds. Theoretically, we establish that the regret of any agent is bounded by $O(\log^{1 + η} T)$ for any $η> 0$. Empirical results further validate the effectiveness of our online learning approach.