A game-theoretic analysis of rank-order mechanisms for user-generated content

Many websites rank user-generated content (UGC) using viewer votes, displaying higher quality contributions more prominently and suppressing lower quality ones. Such an allocation of attention constitutes a mechanism, which can influence the quality of content elicited from attention-motivated contributors. In this paper, we analyze equilibrium behavior in the widely used rank-order mechanism, where contributions are allocated positions on the page in decreasing order of their ratings, and the proportional mechanism which distributes attention in proportion to the number of positive ratings, in a game-theoretic model where agents are motivated by attention and the cost of making a contribution is increasing in its quality.