Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The creator economy is revolutionizing the way in which individuals can profit from their engagement with online platforms. In this paper, we initiate the formal study of online learning in a creator economy by modeling it as a three-party game between users, a platform, and content creators. The platform interacts with creators through contracts under a principal-agent framework and with users via a recommender system. We study how the platform can jointly optimize contracts and recommendation policies in an online learning setting. We analyze return-based and feature-based contracts. Under smoothness assumptions, return-based contracts achieve regret$\Theta(T^{2/3})$. For feature-based contracts, we introduce an intrinsic dimension$d$and prove a regret bound$\mathcal{O}(T^{(d+1)/(d+2)})$, which is tight for linear families.
Language: English
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4377371464