Optimal mechanisms with budget for user generated contents

Abstract: In this paper, we design gross product maximization mechanisms which incentivize users to upload high-quality contents on user-generated-content (UGC) websites. We show that, the proportional division mechanism, which is widely used in practice, can perform arbitrarily bad in the worst case. The problem can be formulated using a linear program with bounded and increasing variables. We then present an $O(n\log n)$ algorithm to find the optimal mechanism, where n is the number of players.