Motivating contributors in social media networks

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. We use a Game theoretic framework to study the dynamics of a social media network wherein 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 and public-sharing to model the dynamics of this interaction. The created model describes the most appropriate contribution strategy from each user's perspective. Next, we consider the problem of mechanism design from a system designer's perspective who is interested in finding the optimal incentive levels to influence the selfish end-users so that the overall system utility is maximized. We demonstrate how a system administrator can exploit the selfishness of its users, to design incentive mechanisms which help in improving the overall task completion probability and system performance, while possibly still benefiting the individual users. Copyright 2009 ACM.