Strategic information disclosure with communication constraints and private preferences

TL;DR

This paper models social media content dissemination as a signaling game with private user preferences and communication constraints, analyzing equilibrium policies for platforms and users.

Contribution

It introduces a game-theoretic framework for strategic information disclosure considering private preferences and communication limits, deriving equilibrium policies.

Findings

Existence of Bayesian Nash Equilibria in the model

Structural properties of optimal disclosure policies

Explicit computation methods for equilibrium strategies

Abstract

Social-media platforms are one of the most prevalent communication media today. In such systems, a large amount of content is generated and available to the platform. However, not all content can be transmitted to every possible user at all times. At the other end are the users, who have their own preferences about which content they enjoy, which is often unknown ex ante to the platform. We model the interaction between the platform and the users as a signaling game with asymmetric information, where each user optimizes its preference disclosure policy, and the platform optimizes its information disclosure policy. We provide structural as well as existence of policies that constitute Bayesian Nash Equilibria, and necessary optimality conditions used to explicitly compute the optimal policies.