The Quality of Content Publishing in the Digital Era

We propose and analyse a game describing the interactions between readers and publishers, with the aim of understanding to what extent the strategic behaviour of the latter may influence the quality of content publishing in the World Wide Web. For games with identical publishers, we provide a wide characterization of the cases in which pure Nash equilibria are guaranteed to exist, which mainly depends on the number of publishers and, subordinately, on some of the parameters we use to model their writing abilities. Then, for any game possessing pure Nash equilibria, we show that the price of anarchy is at most 2, even in presence of heterogeneous publishers. Finally, we provide better and tight bounds for some special cases of games with identical publishers.