Related papers: A Theory of "Likes"
Algorithmic recommender systems such as Spotify and Netflix affect not only consumer behavior but also producer incentives. Producers seek to create content that will be shown by the recommendation algorithm, which can impact both the…
Knowledge acquisition by consumers is a key process in the diffusion of innovations. However, in standard theories of the representative agent, agents do not learn and innovations are adopted instantaneously. Here, we show that in a…
We study the effects of data sharing between firms on prices, profits, and consumer welfare. Although indiscriminate sharing of consumer data decreases firm profits due to the subsequent increase in competition, selective sharing can be…
If you recommend a product to me and I buy it, how much should you be paid by the seller? And if your sole interest is to maximize the amount paid to you by the seller for a sequence of recommendations, how should you recommend optimally if…
The suggestions generated by most existing recommender systems are known to suffer from a lack of diversity, and other issues like popularity bias. As a result, they have been observed to promote well-known "blockbuster" items, and to…
Prior research on exposure fairness in the context of recommender systems has focused mostly on disparities in the exposure of individual or groups of items to individual users of the system. The problem of how individual or groups of items…
An important use of machine learning is to learn what people value. What posts or photos should a user be shown? Which jobs or activities would a person find rewarding? In each case, observations of people's past choices can inform our…
The ongoing rapid expansion of the Internet greatly increases the necessity of effective recommender systems for filtering the abundant information. Extensive research for recommender systems is conducted by a broad range of communities…
With a vast number of items, web-pages, and news to choose from, online services and the customers both benefit tremendously from personalized recommender systems. Such systems however provide great opportunities for targeted…
A demandance is a psychological "pull" exerted by a stimulus. It is closely related to the theory of "affordance". I introduce the theory of demandance, offer some motivating examples, briefly explore its psychological basis, and examine…
The problem of designing a profit-maximizing, Bayesian incentive compatible and individually rational mechanism with flexible consumers and costly heterogeneous supply is considered. In our setup, each consumer is associated with a…
Information about peers' performance is pervasive in workplaces, yet its effects on worker behavior are mixed. We show that a key reason is that workers differ in how they value such information. In a real-effort experiment with 793…
Recommender systems help people find relevant content in a personalized way. One main promise of such systems is that they are able to increase the visibility of items in the long tail, i.e., the lesser-known items in a catalogue. Existing…
Our consumption of online information is mediated by filtering, ranking, and recommendation algorithms that introduce unintentional biases as they attempt to deliver relevant and engaging content. It has been suggested that our reliance on…
We develop a model of social media in which users produce different types of content and choose whom to follow. Even when abstracting from algorithmic bias, linking costs shape networks and polarization. In the welfare-maximizing…
We develop a simple framework to analyze how targeted persuasive advertising shapes market power and welfare. A designer flexibly manipulates the demand curve by influencing individual valuations at a cost. A monopolist prices against this…
A seller posts a price for a single object. The seller's and buyer's values may be interdependent. We characterize the set of payoff vectors across all information structures. Simple feasibility and individual-rationality constraints…
When designing product rankings, online retailers and platforms choose which outcome to maximize: revenues from commissions or markups, the number of transactions, or consumer welfare. These objectives need not align, creating potential…
Popularity bias and positivity bias are two prominent sources of bias in recommender systems. Both arise from input data, propagate through recommendation models, and lead to unfair or suboptimal outcomes. Popularity bias occurs when a…
Recommender systems are a vital tool that helps us to overcome the information overload problem. They are being used by most e-commerce web sites and attract the interest of a broad scientific community. A recommender system uses data on…