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Ranking interfaces are everywhere in online platforms. There is thus an ever growing interest in their Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE), aiming towards an accurate performance evaluation of ranking policies using logged data. A de-facto approach…
Now that AI-driven moderation has become pervasive in everyday life, we often hear claims that "the AI is biased". While this is often said jokingly, the light-hearted remark reflects a deeper concern. How can we be certain that an online…
During deliberation processes, mediators and facilitators typically need to select a small and representative set of opinions later used to produce digestible reports for stakeholders. In online deliberation platforms, algorithmic selection…
Reducing negative user experiences is essential for the success of recommendation platforms. Exposing users to inappropriate content could not only adversely affect users' psychological well-beings, but also potentially drive users away…
Two typical forms of bias in user interaction data with recommender systems (RSs) are popularity bias and positivity bias, which manifest themselves as the over-representation of interactions with popular items or items that users prefer,…
Social media systems rely on user feedback and rating mechanisms for personalization, ranking, and content filtering. However, when users evaluate content contributed by fellow users (e.g., by liking a post or voting on a comment), these…
Instrumental variable (IV) analyses are becoming common in health services research and epidemiology. Most IV analyses use naturally occurring instruments, such as distance to a hospital. In these analyses, investigators must assume the…
To conduct causal inference in observational settings, researchers must rely on certain identifying assumptions. In practice, these assumptions are unlikely to hold exactly. This paper considers the bias of selection-on-observables,…
Online participatory media platforms that enable one-to-many communication among users, see a significant amount of user generated content and consequently face a problem of being able to recommend a subset of this content to its users. We…
Cognitive biases have been shown to lead to faulty decision-making. Recent research has demonstrated that the effect of cognitive biases, anchoring bias in particular, transfers to information visualization and visual analytics. However, it…
People often take user ratings and reviews into consideration when shopping for products or services online. However, such user-generated data contains self-selection bias that could affect people decisions and it is hard to resolve this…
We investigate the dynamics of opinion formation on social networking platforms, focusing on how individual opinions, influenced by both social connections and platform algorithms, evolve. We model this process using a differential…
Predictions in digital platforms must adapt over time as individuals update their beliefs through social interactions. At the same time, changing predictions alter the content people are exposed to and, consequently, the very beliefs they…
Online marketplaces, search engines, and databases employ aggregated social information to rank their content for users. Two ranking heuristics commonly implemented to order the available options are the average review score and item…
A/B tests serve the purpose of reliably identifying the effect of changes introduced in online services. It is common for online platforms to run a large number of simultaneous experiments by splitting incoming user traffic randomly in…
One of the most pressing challenges in the digital media landscape is understanding the impact of biases on the news sources that people rely on for information. Biased news can have significant and far-reaching consequences, influencing…
Many people rely on online social networks as sources of news and information, and the spread of media content with ideologies across the political spectrum influences online discussions and impacts actions offline. To examine the impact of…
Recommendation systems rely on user-provided data to learn about item quality and provide personalized recommendations. An implicit assumption when aggregating ratings into item quality is that ratings are strong indicators of item quality.…
Companies offering web services routinely run randomized online experiments to estimate the causal impact associated with the adoption of new features and policies on key performance metrics of interest. These experiments are used to…
People use the world wide web heavily to share their experience with entities such as products, services, or travel destinations. Texts that provide online feedback in the form of reviews and comments are essential to make consumer…