This paper investigates a principal-agent problem between the operator of an information service online platform and the content provider in which the content provider’s effort to develop new content is unobservable to the operator and the market demand is unknown to both parties and characterized by an uncertain variable. The purpose of the operator is to maximize the total profit earned on the information service’s online platform by designing a contract, whereas the content provider determines the price and the effort level. Next, we apply the critical value criteria to establish two different principal-agent models from the perspective of symmetric and asymmetric effort information. Subsequently, the optimal contracts, the optimal price and the information value of the effort information are derived, respectively. Finally, the impacts of the model parameters on the operator’s profit and the effort’s information value are presented.
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