Paper ID: 2306.10050

Interpolating Item and User Fairness in Multi-Sided Recommendations

Qinyi Chen, Jason Cheuk Nam Liang, Negin Golrezaei, Djallel Bouneffouf

Today's online platforms heavily lean on algorithmic recommendations for bolstering user engagement and driving revenue. However, these recommendations can impact multiple stakeholders simultaneously -- the platform, items (sellers), and users (customers) -- each with their unique objectives, making it difficult to find the right middle ground that accommodates all stakeholders. To address this, we introduce a novel fair recommendation framework, Problem (FAIR), that flexibly balances multi-stakeholder interests via a constrained optimization formulation. We next explore Problem (FAIR) in a dynamic online setting where data uncertainty further adds complexity, and propose a low-regret algorithm FORM that concurrently performs real-time learning and fair recommendations, two tasks that are often at odds. Via both theoretical analysis and a numerical case study on real-world data, we demonstrate the efficacy of our framework and method in maintaining platform revenue while ensuring desired levels of fairness for both items and users.

Submitted: Jun 12, 2023