Related papers: Quantifying Voter Biases in Online Platforms: An I…
Inference for causal effects can benefit from the availability of an instrumental variable (IV) which, by definition, is associated with the given exposure, but not with the outcome of interest other than through a causal exposure effect.…
Opinion polls have now become a very important component of society because they are now a defacto component of our daily news cycle and because their results influence governments and business in ways which are not always obvious to us.…
Offline evaluations of recommender systems attempt to estimate users' satisfaction with recommendations using static data from prior user interactions. These evaluations provide researchers and developers with first approximations of the…
A common explanation for negative user impacts of content recommender systems is misalignment between the platform's objective and user welfare. In this work, we show that misalignment in the platform's objective is not the only potential…
Academic research in recommender systems has been greatly focusing on the accuracy-related measures of recommendations. Even when non-accuracy measures such as popularity bias, diversity, and novelty are studied, it is often solely from the…
We introduce the incremental voter model (IVM), a discrete-opinion multi-agent system where agents undergo step-wise transitions biased by the opinion of a randomly selected persuader. Our incremental voter model comprises a large…
Confirmation bias and peer pressure both have substantial impacts on the formation of collective decisions. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to study how the interplay between these two mechanisms affects public opinion evolution.…
Causally identifying the effect of digital advertising is challenging, because experimentation is expensive, and observational data lacks random variation. This paper identifies a pervasive source of naturally occurring, quasi-experimental…
Opinion evolution and judgment revision are mediated through social influence. Based on a large crowdsourced in vitro experiment (n=861), it is shown how a consensus model can be used to predict opinion evolution in online collective…
Several studies have identified discrepancies between the popularity of items in user profiles and the corresponding recommendation lists. Such behavior, which concerns a variety of recommendation algorithms, is referred to as popularity…
In the statistical literature, a number of methods have been proposed to ensure valid inference about marginal effects of variables on a longitudinal outcome in settings with irregular monitoring times. However, the potential biases due to…
Instrumental variable (IV) methods are widely used to adjust for the bias in estimating treatment effects caused by unmeasured confounders in observational studies. In this manuscript, we provide empirical and theoretical evidence that the…
Preference elicitation frameworks feature heavily in the research on participatory ethical AI tools and provide a viable mechanism to enquire and incorporate the moral values of various stakeholders. As part of the elicitation process,…
We have conducted three empirical studies of the effects of friend recommendations and general ratings on how online users make choices. These two components of social influence were investigated through user studies on Mechanical Turk. We…
Background: Previous studies suggest that social media use among the youth is correlated with online and offline political participation. There is also a mixed and inconclusive debate on whether more online political participation in the…
The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As a…
Bias in online information has recently become a pressing issue, with search engines, social networks and recommendation services being accused of exhibiting some form of bias. In this vision paper, we make the case for a systematic…
Recommender systems have become integral to digital experiences, shaping user interactions and preferences across various platforms. Despite their widespread use, these systems often suffer from algorithmic biases that can lead to unfair…
Despite the potential impact of explanations on decision making, there is a lack of research on quantifying their effect on users' choices. This paper presents an experimental protocol for measuring the degree to which positively or…
Recommendation algorithms have become the dominant mechanism for information distribution on digital platforms, profoundly shaping personalized information consumption environments. However, gender bias, as a significant form of algorithmic…