Related papers: Consumer Manipulation via Online Behavioral Advert…
Companies that have an online presence-in particular, companies that are exclusively digital-often subscribe to this business model: collect data from the user base, then expose the data to advertisement agencies in order to turn a profit.…
Environments built for people are increasingly operated by a new class of economic actors: LLM-powered software agents making decisions on our behalf. These decisions range from our purchases to travel plans to medical treatment selection.…
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…
Targeted advertising remains an important part of the free web browsing experience, where advertisers' targeting and personalization algorithms together find the most relevant audience for millions of ads every day. However, given the wide…
Consumer spending accounts for a large fraction of the US economic activity. Increasingly, consumer activity is moving to the web, where digital traces of shopping and purchases provide valuable data about consumer behavior. We analyze…
Autonomous agents (robots) face tremendous challenges while interacting with heterogeneous human agents in close proximity. One of these challenges is that the autonomous agent does not have an accurate model tailored to the specific human…
As AI-driven agents become increasingly integrated into the digital ecosystem, they reshape how online advertising is perceived and processed. Particularly in the travel and hotel booking sector, these autonomous systems influence the…
The digital revolution has led to the digitization of human behavior, creating unprecedented opportunities to understand observable actions on an unmatched scale. Emerging phenomena such as crowdfunding and crowdsourcing have further…
Our society can benefit immensely from algorithmic decision-making and similar types of artificial intelligence. But algorithmic decision-making can also have discriminatory effects. This paper examines that problem, using online price…
Personalization is pervasive in the online space as, when combined with learning, it leads to higher efficiency and revenue by allowing the most relevant content to be served to each user. However, recent studies suggest that such…
Facebook and other advertising platforms exploit users data for marketing purposes by allowing advertisers to select specific users and target them (the practice is being called micro-targeting). However, advertisers such as Cambridge…
To protect consumer privacy, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) mandates that businesses provide consumers with a straightforward way to opt out of the sale and sharing of their personal information. However, the control that…
Data protection regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, require websites and embedded third-parties, especially advertisers, to seek user consent before they can collect and process user data. Only when the users opt in, can these entities…
AI systems have increasingly become our gateways to the Internet. We argue that just as advertising has driven the monetization of web search and social media, so too will commercial incentives shape the content served by AI. Unlike…
Many internet platforms that collect behavioral big data use it to predict user behavior for internal purposes and for their business customers (e.g., advertisers, insurers, security forces, governments, political consulting firms) who…
Modern collaborative filtering algorithms seek to provide personalized product recommendations by uncovering patterns in consumer-product interactions. However, these interactions can be biased by how the product is marketed, for example…
Online advertisements have become one of today's most widely used tools for enhancing businesses partly because of their compatibility with A/B testing. A/B testing allows sellers to find effective advertisement strategies such as ad…
We focus on the online-based active learning (OAL) setting where an agent operates over a stream of observations and trades-off between the costly acquisition of information (labelled observations) and the cost of prediction errors. We…
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) -- which began enforcement on July 1, 2020 -- grants California users the affirmative right to opt-out of the sale of their personal information. In this work, we perform a series of observational…
Consumers value keeping some information about them private from potential marketers. E-commerce dramatically increases the potential for marketers to accumulate otherwise private information about potential customers. Online marketers…