Related papers: Diversity and Exploration in Social Learning

In search engines, online marketplaces and other human-computer interfaces large collectives of individuals sequentially interact with numerous alternatives of varying quality. In these contexts, trial and error (exploration) is crucial for…

Personalization, including both self-selected and pre-selected, is inevitable when tremendous amounts of media content are available. Personalization, which is believed to cause people to consume fewer diverse contents, can lead to…

Consumption practices are determined by a combination of economic, social, and cultural forces. We posit that lower economic constraints leave more room to diversify consumption along cultural and social aspects in the form of omnivorous or…

Motivated by agentic markets -- two-sided markets in which consumers and businesses are assisted by AI tools that facilitate consumers' search -- we study the impact of improved search technology on learning and welfare in markets. We put…

To choose between two discrete goods, a consumer pays attention to only those with prices below a threshold. From these, she chooses her most preferred good. We assume consumers in a population have the same preference but may have…

Individuals often navigate several options with incomplete knowledge of their own preferences. Information provisioning tools such as public rankings and personalized recommendations have become central to helping individuals make choices,…

Accuracy and diversity have long been considered to be two conflicting goals for recommendations. We point out, however, that as the diversity is typically measured by certain pre-selected item attributes, e.g., category as the most…

Iterative voting is a natural model of repeated strategic decision-making in social choice theory when agents have the opportunity to update their votes prior to finalizing the group decision. Prior work has analyzed the efficacy of…

The minority model was introduced to study the competition between agents with limited information. It has the remarkable feature that, as the amount of information available increases, the collective gain made by the agents is reduced.…

Providing recommendations that are both relevant and diverse is a key consideration of modern recommender systems. Optimizing both of these measures presents a fundamental trade-off, as higher diversity typically comes at the cost of…

We study consumption behaviour in systems with heterogeneous interacting agents. Two different models are introduced, respectively with long and short range interactions among agents. At any time step an agent decides whether or not to…

There are both benefits and drawbacks to cultural diversity. It can lead to friction and exacerbate differences. However, as with biological diversity, cultural diversity is valuable in times of upheaval; if a previously effective solution…

Exploration is a key problem in reinforcement learning, since agents can only learn from data they acquire in the environment. With that in mind, maintaining a population of agents is an attractive method, as it allows data be collected…

Search queries are appropriate when users have explicit intent, but they perform poorly when the intent is difficult to express or if the user is simply looking to be inspired. Visual browsing systems allow e-commerce platforms to address…

A common phenomena in modern recommendation systems is the use of feedback from one user to infer the `value' of an item to other users. This results in an exploration vs. exploitation trade-off, in which items of possibly low value have to…

This paper proposes a method for estimating consumer preferences among discrete choices, where the consumer chooses at most one product in a category, but selects from multiple categories in parallel. The consumer's utility is additive in…

We consider a version of large population games whose agents compete for resources using strategies with adaptable preferences. The games can be used to model economic markets, ecosystems or distributed control. Diversity of initial…

Schelling games use a game-theoretic approach to study the phenomenon of residential segregation as originally modeled by Schelling. Inspired by the recent increase in the number of people and businesses preferring and promoting diversity,…

Collective, especially group-based, managerial decision making is crucial in organizations. Using an evolutionary theoretic approach to collective decision making, agent-based simulations were conducted to investigate how human collective…

Fairness-aware recommender systems often mitigate bias by increasing exposure to under-represented or long-tail content, commonly through mechanisms that promote novelty and diversity. In practice, the strength of such interventions is…