Reactive Users vs. Recommendation Systems: An Adaptive Policy to Manage Opinion Drifts

TL;DR

This paper explores how users aware of recommendation system influences can adopt adaptive strategies to prevent opinion drifts, showing that reactive policies outperform fixed ones in maintaining opinion stability and user utility.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes a reactive user policy that adaptively reduces content engagement following opinion drifts, demonstrating its effectiveness over passive policies.

Findings

Reactive policies prevent opinion drifts effectively.

Adaptive policies improve user utility when preserving opinions.

Numerical simulations validate theoretical results.

Abstract

Recommendation systems are used in a range of platforms to maximize user engagement through personalization and the promotion of popular content. It has been found that such recommendations may shape users' opinions over time. In this paper, we ask whether reactive users, who are cognizant of the influence of the content they consume, can prevent such changes by adaptively adjusting their content consumption choices. To this end, we study users' opinion dynamics under two types of stochastic policies: a passive policy where the probability of clicking on recommended content is fixed and a reactive policy where clicking probability adaptively decreases following large opinion drifts. We analytically derive the expected opinion and user utility under these policies. We show that the adaptive policy can help users prevent opinion drifts and that when a user prioritizes opinion preservation, the expected utility of the adaptive policy outperforms the fixed policy. We validate our theoretical findings through numerical simulations. These findings help better understand how user-level strategies can challenge the biases induced by recommendation systems.