The Social Medium Selection Game

TL;DR

This paper models the competition among content creators choosing social media platforms as a congestion game, analyzing equilibria, potential functions, and proposing algorithms for equilibrium computation and learning.

Contribution

It introduces a congestion game model for social media selection, characterizes equilibria using M-concavity, and develops algorithms for equilibrium computation and learning.

Findings

Multiple equilibria can exist in the game.

The potential function is M-concave, enabling equilibrium analysis.

Algorithms are provided for computing and learning equilibria.

Abstract

We consider in this paper competition of content creators in routing their content through various media. The routing decisions may correspond to the selection of a social network (e.g. twitter versus facebook or linkedin) or of a group within a given social network. The utility for a player to send its content to some medium is given as the difference between the dissemination utility at this medium and some transmission cost. We model this game as a congestion game and compute the pure potential of the game. In contrast to the continuous case, we show that there may be various equilibria. We show that the potential is M-concave which allows us to characterize the equilibria and to propose an algorithm for computing it. We then give a learning mechanism which allow us to give an efficient algorithm to determine an equilibrium. We finally determine the asymptotic form of the equilibrium and discuss the implications on the social medium selection problem.