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arXiv · 2503.18168

Strategic Prompt Pricing for AIGC Services: A User-Centric Approach

Xiang Li·Bing Luo·Jianwei Huang·Yuan Luo
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Abstract

The rapid growth of AI-generated content (AIGC) services has created an urgent need for effective prompt pricing strategies, yet current approaches overlook users' strategic two-step decision-making process in selecting and utilizing generative AI models. This oversight creates two key technical challenges: quantifying the relationship between user prompt capabilities and generation outcomes, and optimizing platform payoff while accounting for heterogeneous user behaviors. We address these challenges by introducing prompt ambiguity, a theoretical framework that captures users' varying abilities in prompt engineering, and developing an Optimal Prompt Pricing (OPP) algorithm. Our analysis reveals a counterintuitive insight: users with higher prompt ambiguity (i.e., lower capability) exhibit non-monotonic prompt usage patterns, first increasing then decreasing with ambiguity levels, reflecting complex changes in marginal utility. Experimental evaluation using a character-level GPT-like model demonstrates that our OPP algorithm achieves up to 31.72% improvement in platform payoff compared to existing pricing mechanisms, validating the importance of user-centric prompt pricing in AIGC services.

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Xiang Li, Bing Luo, Jianwei Huang, Yuan Luo. 2025-03-23. Strategic Prompt Pricing for AIGC Services: A User-Centric Approach. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18168

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