Incentivizing High-Quality Content from Heterogeneous Users: On the Existence of Nash Equilibrium

Abstract

We study the existence of pure Nash equilibrium (PNE) for the mechanisms used in Internet services (e.g., online reviews and question-answering websites) to incentivize users to generate high-quality content. Most existing work assumes that users are homogeneous and have the same ability. However, real-world users are heterogeneous and their abilities can be very different from each other due to their diversity in background, culture, and profession. In this work, we consider the following setting: (1) the users are heterogeneous and each of them has a private type indicating the best quality of the content he/she can generate; (2) all the users share a fixed total reward. With this setting, we study the existence of pure Nash equilibrium of several mechanisms composed by different allocation rules, action spaces, and information availability. We prove the existence of PNE for some mechanisms and the non-existence for some other mechanisms. We also discuss how to find a PNE (if exists) through either a constructive way or a search algorithm.