Robust reputation independence in ranking systems for multiple sensitive attributes

Ranking systems have an unprecedented influence on how and what information people access, and their impact on our society is being analyzed from different perspectives, such as users’ discrimination. A notable example is represented by reputation-based ranking systems, a class of systems that rely on users’ reputation to generate a non-personalized item-ranking, proved to be biased against certain demographic classes. To safeguard that a given sensitive user’s attribute does not systematically affect the reputation of that user, prior work has operationalized a reputation independence constraint on this class of systems. In this paper, we uncover that guaranteeing reputation independence for a single sensitive attribute is not enough. When mitigating biases based on one sensitive attribute (e.g., gender), the final ranking might still be biased against certain demographic groups formed based on another attribute (e.g., age). Hence, we propose a novel approach to introduce reputation independence for multiple sensitive attributes simultaneously. We then analyze the extent to which our approach impacts on discrimination and other important properties of the ranking system, such as its quality and robustness against attacks. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that our approach leads to less biased rankings with respect to multiple users’ sensitive attributes, without affecting the system’s quality and robustness

Predicting the “helpfulness” of online consumer reviews

YesOnline shopping is increasingly becoming people's first choice when shopping, as it is very convenient to choose products based on their reviews. Even for moderately popular products, there are thousands of reviews constantly being posted on e-commerce sites. Such a large volume of data constantly being generated can be considered as a big data challenge for both online businesses and consumers. That makes it difficult for buyers to go through all the reviews to make purchase decisions. In this research, we have developed models based on machine learning that can predict the helpfulness of the consumer reviews using several textual features such as polarity, subjectivity, entropy, and reading ease. The model will automatically assign helpfulness values to an initial review as soon as it is posted on the website so that the review gets a fair chance of being viewed by other buyers. The results of this study will help buyers to write better reviews and thereby assist other buyers in making their purchase decisions, as well as help businesses to improve their websites

Ranking online consumer reviews

YesProduct reviews are posted online by the hundreds and thousands for popular products. Handling such a large volume of continuously generated online content is a challenging task for buyers, sellers and researchers. The purpose of this study is to rank the overwhelming number of reviews using their predicted helpfulness scores. The helpfulness score is predicted using features extracted from review text, product description, and customer question-answer data of a product using the random-forest classifier and gradient boosting regressor. The system classifies reviews into low or high quality with the random-forest classifier. The helpfulness scores of the high-quality reviews are only predicted using the gradient boosting regressor. The helpfulness scores of the low-quality reviews are not calculated because they are never going to be in the top k reviews. They are just added at the end of the review list to the review-listing website. The proposed system provides fair review placement on review listing pages and makes all high-quality reviews visible to customers on the top. The experimental results on data from two popular Indian e-commerce websites validate our claim, as 3–4 newer high-quality reviews are placed in the top ten reviews along with 5–6 older reviews based on review helpfulness. Our findings indicate that inclusion of features from product description data and customer question-answer data improves the prediction accuracy of the helpfulness score.Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India for financial support during research work through “Visvesvaraya PhD Scheme for Electronics and IT”

The Role of Knowledge Share, Satisfaction, Social Commerce Usage Experience on Smart Mobile Device User’s Purchase Intentions: Evidence from South Korean Consumers

This thesis analyses the factors that contribute to consumers’ intention to make online purchases via smart mobile devices. To examine consumers’ purchase intentions, frameworks described in the marketing and information system literatures were integrated, and a theoretical framework was then proposed. In total, 498 Korean consumers were recruited to participate in the study, and structural equation modelling was used to examine the proposed model. The results confirm that (1) consumers’ mobile commerce usage experience positively influences their usage experience with social commerce sites, their satisfaction toward social commerce sites, and their intentions to share knowledge; (2) usage experience with social commerce sites has a significant impact on consumers’ intention to purchase; (3) satisfaction toward social commerce sites has a positive influence on consumers’ intention to purchase; and (4) consumers’ intention to share knowledge positively influences their intention to purchase. Implications are drawn for both academics and practitioners, providing directions for future research