Related papers: Measuring Self-Preferencing on Digital Platforms
Recommender systems are personalized information access applications; they are ubiquitous in today's online environment, and effective at finding items that meet user needs and tastes. As the reach of recommender systems has extended, it…
As e-commerce rapidly integrates artificial intelligence for content creation and product recommendations, these technologies offer significant benefits in personalization and efficiency. AI-driven systems automate product descriptions,…
There is a growing concern that e-commerce platforms are amplifying vaccine-misinformation. To investigate, we conduct two-sets of algorithmic audits for vaccine misinformation on the search and recommendation algorithms of Amazon --…
In fashion e-commerce platforms, product discovery is one of the key components of a good user experience. There are numerous ways using which people find the products they desire. Similar product recommendations is one of the popular modes…
This paper studies the measurement of advertising effects on online platforms when parallel experimentation occurs, that is, when multiple advertisers experiment concurrently. It provides a framework that makes precise how parallel…
Users worldwide access massive amounts of curated data in the form of rankings on a daily basis. The societal impact of this ease of access has been studied and work has been done to propose and enforce various notions of fairness in…
Algorithmic fairness for artificial intelligence has become increasingly relevant as these systems become more pervasive in society. One realm of AI, recommender systems, presents unique challenges for fairness due to trade offs between…
Increased data gathering capacity, together with the spread of data analytics techniques, has prompted an unprecedented concentration of information related to the individuals' preferences in the hands of a few gatekeepers. In the present…
Central to privacy concerns is that firms may use consumer data to price discriminate. A common policy response is that consumers should be given control over which firms access their data and how. Since firms learn about a consumer's…
In many online platforms, customers' decisions are substantially influenced by product rankings as most customers only examine a few top-ranked products. Concurrently, such platforms also use the same data corresponding to customers'…
Online marketplaces will be transformed by autonomous AI agents acting on behalf of consumers. Rather than humans browsing and clicking, AI agents can parse webpages or leverage APIs to view, evaluate and choose products. We investigate the…
What do pickles and trampolines have in common? In this paper we show that while purchases for these products may seem innocuous, they risk revealing clues about customers' personal attributes - in this case, their race. As online retail…
Interference between treated and untreated units is a source of bias in marketplace experiments. In this paper, we specifically consider pricing interventions, in which a platform seeks to adjust base pricing levels at the marketplace level…
Online platforms and regulators face a continuing problem of designing effective evaluation metrics. While tools for collecting and processing data continue to progress, this has not addressed the problem of "unknown unknowns", or…
In this paper, we study behavior of bidders in an experimental launch of a new advertising auction platform by Zillow, as Zillow switched from negotiated contracts to using auctions in several geographically isolated markets. A unique…
Online platforms in the Internet Economy commonly incorporate recommender systems that recommend products (or "arms") to users (or "agents"). A key challenge in this domain arises from myopic agents who are naturally incentivized to exploit…
Interleaving sponsored results (advertisements) amongst organic results on search engine result pages (SERP) has become a common practice across multiple digital platforms. Advertisements have catered to consumer satisfaction and fostered…
Rankings have become the primary interface in two-sided online markets. Many have noted that the rankings not only affect the satisfaction of the users (e.g., customers, listeners, employers, travelers), but that the position in the ranking…
The intrusiveness and the increasing invasiveness of online advertising have, in the last few years, raised serious concerns regarding user privacy and Web usability. As a reaction to these concerns, we have witnessed the emergence of a…
We propose a framework for measuring attentional agency, which we define as a user's ability to allocate attention according to their own desires, goals, and intentions on digital platforms that use statistical learning to prioritize…