A Nutritional Label for Rankings

Algorithmic decisions often result in scoring and ranking individuals to determine credit worthiness, qualifications for college admissions and employment, and compatibility as dating partners. While automatic and seemingly objective, ranking algorithms can discriminate against individuals and protected groups, and exhibit low diversity. Furthermore, ranked results are often unstable --- small changes in the input data or in the ranking methodology may lead to drastic changes in the output, making the result uninformative and easy to manipulate. Similar concerns apply in cases where items other than individuals are ranked, including colleges, academic departments, or products. In this demonstration we present Ranking Facts, a Web-based application that generates a "nutritional label" for rankings. Ranking Facts is made up of a collection of visual widgets that implement our latest research results on fairness, stability, and transparency for rankings, and that communicate details of the ranking methodology, or of the output, to the end user. We will showcase Ranking Facts on real datasets from different domains, including college rankings, criminal risk assessment, and financial services.Comment: 4 pages, SIGMOD demo, 3 figuress, ACM SIGMOD 201

LABEL USE AND IMPORTANCE RANKINGS FOR SELECTED MILK LABELING ATTRIBUTES

Results from a random telephone survey of households in 13 southern states suggest that 80 percent of respondents use labels when making food purchasing decisions. Label users are more likely to be college-educated, female, living in the East South Central Region, and to be childless or to have children between the ages of five and twelve. Age is invariant to label use; however, older respondents are more likely to assign higher importance ratings to caloric, fat, sodium, and cholesterol content than to price, expiration date, and brand when buying fresh-fluid milk.Agribusiness,

Intergenerational Use of and Attitudes Toward Food Labels in Louisiana

Results from a random sample of 1,300 households in Louisiana suggest that seniors are the most frequent users of food labels, but they are also more likely to agree that labels are hard to interpret. Consumers in the 18-to-25 age group are more likely to use friends, relatives, and food-company publications as their main sources of nutritional information.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Do Consumers Really Use Food Labels?

Ordered Probit models are used to estimate the probabilities of consumers reading food labels for harmful ingredients and for using labels to assist with food purchasing decisions. Demographics, health concerns, attitudes, and eating habits are shown to influence the likelihood of using food labels. Effects from over 25 variables are ranked in terms of their relative impacts on the use of food labels. Dieting, concerns about calories, foreign foods, and many other variable effects on the use of food labels are shown.Consumer/Household Economics,

AN ANALYSIS OF CONSUMER PERCEPTIONS OF FRESH FISH AND SEAFOOD IN THE DELMARVA REGION

Consumer/Household Economics,

PREFERENCES FOR FOOD LABELS: A DISCRETE CHOICE APPROACH

Nutritional labels, label formats, consumer preferences, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Running on Empty: Nutritional Access for Children in Cook County, IL, Appendices A & B

Appendices A & B for Running on Empty: Nutritional Access for Children in Cook County, I

Motivation crowding in real consumption decisions: Who is messing with my groceries?

We present evidence of crowding out of intrinsic motivation in real purchasing decisions from a field experiment in a large supermarket chain. We compare three instruments, a label, a subsidy and a neutral price change, in their ability to induce consumers to switch from dirty to clean products. Interestingly a subsidy framed as an intervention is less effective than either a label or a neutrally framed price change. We argue that this provides a new explanation for crowding behaviour: consumers are resistant to having the line of demarcation between public and private decision making moved - in either direction