Designing Platform Incentives for Balancing Content Creation and Advertising Integration
研究用户生成内容平台如何通过激励设计影响创作者在内容质量与广告整合间的资源分配，发现平台在内容质量低时提供高激励，质量超过阈值后降低激励，且创作者效率提升可能降低平台利润和消费者剩余。
When placing product promotion in contents, creators face the challenge of balancing the limited resources between creating high-quality content and integrating advertising seamlessly to mitigate advertising disutility. We conceptualize a creator on a user-generated content platform who maximizes both traffic-based revenue and commissions from selling products. Our study investigates how the platform leverages content incentives to influence the creator's devotion to content creation as well as viewers' engagement. Our modeling analysis reveals several interesting findings. We observe that the platform provides high incentives when content quality is low, but reduces them once quality exceeds a certain threshold. Correspondingly, the creator first devotes full effort to content creation and then shifts more effort to advertising integration. Our results suggest that an increase in the creator's efficiency in mitigating advertising disutility or the commission reduces the creator's motivation in content creation, ultimately lowering the platform's profit and consumer surplus. However, the creator does not always benefit from these improvements. In fact, the profit can diminish if the creator's efficiency in advertising integration or the commission becomes high enough. Furthermore, we demonstrate the robustness of our insights under several key model extensions, including platform sales commissions and asymmetric cost structure.