Mechanism Design for Incentivizing Social Media Contributions

Abstract Despite recent advancements in user-driven social media platforms, tools for studying user behavior patterns and motivations remain primitive. We highlight the voluntary nature of user contributions and that users can choose when (and when not) to contribute to the common media pool. A Game theoretic framework is pro-posed to study the dynamics of social media networks where contribution costs are individual but gains are common. We model users as rational selfish agents, and consider domain attributes like voluntary participation, virtual reward structure, network effect, and public-sharing to model the dynamics of this interaction. The created model describes the most appropriate contribution strategy from each user’s perspective and also highlights issues like ‘free-rider ’ problem and individual ra-tionality leading to irrational (i.e. sub-optimal) group behavior. We also consider the perspective of the system designer who is interested in finding the best incen-tive mechanisms to influence the selfish end-users so that the overall system utility is maximized. We propose and compare multiple mechanisms (based on optimal bonus payment, social incentive leveraging, and second price auction) to study how a system designer can exploit the selfishness of its users, to design incentive mech-anisms which improve the overall task-completion probability and system perfor-mance, while possibly still benefiting the individual users.