User Welfare Optimization in Recommender Systems with Competing Content Creators

TL;DR

This paper introduces a platform-driven optimization approach for recommender systems with competing creators, aiming to enhance long-term user welfare by dynamically signaling user preferences and influencing creator strategies.

Contribution

It proposes an algorithmic framework for the platform to optimize user welfare in competitive content creation environments using dynamic weighting and mechanism design.

Findings

Creators' strategies can converge to sub-optimal states without intervention

The proposed mechanisms improve user welfare in offline experiments

Online deployment shows positive impact on user satisfaction and creator behavior

Abstract

Driven by the new economic opportunities created by the creator economy, an increasing number of content creators rely on and compete for revenue generated from online content recommendation platforms. This burgeoning competition reshapes the dynamics of content distribution and profoundly impacts long-term user welfare on the platform. However, the absence of a comprehensive picture of global user preference distribution often traps the competition, especially the creators, in states that yield sub-optimal user welfare. To encourage creators to best serve a broad user population with relevant content, it becomes the platform's responsibility to leverage its information advantage regarding user preference distribution to accurately signal creators. In this study, we perform system-side user welfare optimization under a competitive game setting among content creators. We propose an algorithmic solution for the platform, which dynamically computes a sequence of weights for each user based on their satisfaction of the recommended content. These weights are then utilized to design mechanisms that adjust the recommendation policy or the post-recommendation rewards, thereby influencing creators' content production strategies. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we report our findings from a series of experiments, including: 1. a proof-of-concept negative example illustrating how creators' strategies converge towards sub-optimal states without platform intervention; 2. offline experiments employing our proposed intervention mechanisms on diverse datasets; and 3. results from a three-week online experiment conducted on a leading short-video recommendation platform.