Are Content Creators out of ideas or they are just doing something strategically optimal? Just to be loud & clear, by Content Creators I mean Journalists, Op-ed Columnists, Comedians, Singers,etc.
Unsuspecting people might have a strong opinion that the content produced by the Content Creators just have a bit of moralistic fervour but they are just good content made by artistic choice and not a result of some cunning assembly-line thinking of content production.
Can we develop any kind of Mathematical or Economic model to explain this separation of Content Creators along this theme?
As a student of economics, I believe that the subject has best analytical tools to explain any behaviour and not give some predictive insights as most people would like to believe. So, here is my explanation or rather a simplified model to show why do Journalists & Comedians (Content Creators) target popular ideas/beliefs and extremely popular public personalities.
We don't need to go far. John Nash has given us a versatile structure to address these types of strategic interactions. Let's try to modify the strategic or normal-form game table
Why do Journalists & Comedians target popular ideas/beliefs/figures? - A game theoretic point of view
Before you try to wrap your head around this intimidating looking table, I have a video in my Youtube Channel which you can watch below:
If you have understood what I was trying to show on my youtube video, then you don't need to read further. Thanks! But, if you need more fillers to understand the model in detail, let me start my exposition. (I'll also be attaching my slides at the bottom of this post)
Content Creator has two strategies , 'Attack the Popular' and 'Be Neutral'. And, Society has two strategic sentiment choices, it can choose to 'Ignore the Creator' or 'Give Attention'. The relevant payoff or notional value is given in the table above, of the form (Creator's Value, Society's Value)
What could be the equilibrium in such a situation? We cannot claim this equilibrium to be a Nash Equilibrium, in the real sense of the term, as we are trying to engage in a very different environment than n-player simultaneous move game.
In order for you to understand the payoff structure well, assume that the society is composed of two types of people. One group is attached to the 'popular idea' being attacked and the other group which is not bothered. So, if the Content Creator attacks the popular idea and society chooses to ignore the Creator & doesn't give him enough publicity & marketing, society has a negative value because one group gets negative payoff and the other group gets nothing. Now, when society responds to Creator's attack with attention, society gets 0 as half of the people get some value and the remaining get negative. (Oversimplification Alert!)
Similarly, you can figure out the rest of the table.
Let's jump to the substance of this analysis.
Consider the case when h > 2 (as in the digram above)
This would imply that 600/h < 300. This has an implication on the outcome of the model. If you look at the cell containing (300,0) or when society responds to Creator's attack with attention , you can very well reason that it is an equilibrium, you can call it Nash equilibrium but it won't be technically correct to say so. Given that the Creator is going to attack the 'popular idea', society is better off with giving him/her attention because if society unilaterally moves to ignoring the Creator, they will receive a negative payoff of -300. Similarly, given that society is giving the Creator the attention he/she craves for, Creator gets 300 and if he resorts to producing 'Neutral Content' instead, he will get only 600/h < 300. So, he also has no profitable unilateral deviation. Hence, this is an equilibrium. This is generally observed when the Creator is upcoming and not so famous or produces relatively substandard content.
Consider the case when h < 2 (as in the diagram above)
This would imply that 600/h > 300. This means that the Creator is having an incentive to move away from content which sparks outrage to producing 'Neutral Content'. Production of 'Neutral Content' becomes a 'Dominant Strategy' for the Creator. Now, it depends upon the value of K, which you can see in the image above, how the society is going to react to Creator's 'Neutral Content'.
To put it briefly,
- K>600/h means society remembers that the Creator has a history of producing content which was attacking in nature(attacking the popular idea...) and dislikes the Creator giving us an equilibrium outcome of Creator being 'Neutral' but still gets 'Ignored'
- K<600/h means that society respects & enjoys the Content created by the 'Neutral Content Creator' and we get the best type of win-win equilibrium with payoff equivalent to (600/h, 600/h).
Summary:
This model predicts that new 'Content Creators' who want to establish themselves, resort to attacking popular ideas & personalities and society gives them attention; this is an equilibrium. Also, a Creator who is liked by the society has a dominant strategy to produce 'Neutral Content'. This further implies that when a Creator starts getting some fame he/she has a 'Dominant Strategy' to quickly pivot from provocative/sensitive content to 'Neutral Content', as persistence of attack is suboptimal strategy.