Strategic Prompt Pricing for AIGC Services: A User-Centric Approach
This work addresses the need for effective pricing strategies in AIGC services, focusing on user heterogeneity, but it is incremental as it builds on existing pricing mechanisms with a novel user-centric approach.
The paper tackles the problem of pricing prompts for AI-generated content services by addressing users' strategic decision-making, introducing a framework for prompt ambiguity and an algorithm that improves platform payoff by up to 31.72% compared to existing mechanisms.
The rapid growth of AI-generated content (AIGC) services has created an urgent need for effective prompt pricing strategies, yet current approaches overlook users' strategic two-step decision-making process in selecting and utilizing generative AI models. This oversight creates two key technical challenges: quantifying the relationship between user prompt capabilities and generation outcomes, and optimizing platform payoff while accounting for heterogeneous user behaviors. We address these challenges by introducing prompt ambiguity, a theoretical framework that captures users' varying abilities in prompt engineering, and developing an Optimal Prompt Pricing (OPP) algorithm. Our analysis reveals a counterintuitive insight: users with higher prompt ambiguity (i.e., lower capability) exhibit non-monotonic prompt usage patterns, first increasing then decreasing with ambiguity levels, reflecting complex changes in marginal utility. Experimental evaluation using a character-level GPT-like model demonstrates that our OPP algorithm achieves up to 31.72% improvement in platform payoff compared to existing pricing mechanisms, validating the importance of user-centric prompt pricing in AIGC services.