Online Learning in a Creator Economy

The creator economy refers to a rapidly growing online-platform-facilitated economy that brings together content creators and users, allowing creators to earn revenue from their creations [Banks and Humphreys, 2008, Bhargava, 2022, El Sanyoura and Anderson, 2022, Radionova and Trots, 2021, Schram, 2020]. These platforms monetize the content created by content creators through various means, including paid audience partnerships, ad revenue, tipping platforms, and product sales provided by the users. The creator economy can be viewed as a three-party game linking users, platform, and content creators. On the one hand, we can model the interactions between the platform and the content creator as a principal-agent relationship, focusing on the need to incentivize the production of high-quality content by the content creator. The platform would like to collect better content to enhance the desirability of the platform. The content creator wishes to gain profit on the platform from their content. The two sides develop agreements in the form of a contract, which specifies how much the platform would pay under the different possible kinds of content. By learning the intent and interest of the content creator, the platform is able to identify a better way to incentivize participation and share the profit with the content creator. The overall framework is contract theory, which is a branch of the theory of incentives [Bolton and Dewatripont, 2004, Faure-Grimaud et al., 2001, Grossman and Hart, 1992, Salanié, 2005].