{"ID":2875278,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01970","arxiv_id":"2509.01970","title":"Dynamics in Two-Sided Attention Markets: Objective, Optimization, and Control","abstract":"With most content distributed online and mediated by platforms, there is a pressing need to understand the ecosystem of content creation and consumption. A considerable body of recent work shed light on the one-sided market on creator-platform or user-platform interactions, showing key properties of static (Nash) equilibria and online learning. In this work, we examine the {\\it two-sided} market including the platform and both users and creators. We design a potential function for the coupled interactions among users, platform and creators. We show that such coupling of creators' best-response dynamics with users' multilogit choices is equivalent to mirror descent on this potential function. Furthermore, a range of platform ranking strategies correspond to a family of potential functions, and the dynamics of two-sided interactions still correspond to mirror descent. We also provide new local convergence result for mirror descent in non-convex functions, which could be of independent interest. Our results provide a theoretical foundation for explaining the diverse outcomes observed in attention markets.","short_abstract":"With most content distributed online and mediated by platforms, there is a pressing need to understand the ecosystem of content creation and consumption. A considerable body of recent work shed light on the one-sided market on creator-platform or user-platform interactions, showing key properties of static (Nash) equil...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01970","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01970v1","authors":"[\"Haiqing Zhu\",\"Yun Kuen Cheung\",\"Lexing Xie\"]","published":"2025-09-02T05:19:20Z","proceeding":"cs.SI","tasks":"[\"cs.SI\",\"cs.GT\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}