Ranking with Popularity Bias: User Welfare under Self-Amplification Dynamics. (arXiv:2305.18333v2 [cs.IR] UPDATED)

While popularity bias is recognized to play a crucial role in recommmender
(and other ranking-based) systems, detailed analysis of its impact on
collective user welfare has largely been lacking. We propose and theoretically
analyze a general mechanism, rooted in many of the models proposed in the
literature, by which item popularity, item quality, and position bias jointly
impact user choice. We focus on a standard setting in which user utility is
largely driven by item quality, and a recommender attempts …

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