Fairness Dynamics in Digital Economy Platforms with Biased Ratings
J. Martin Smit, Fernando P. Santos

TL;DR
This paper models how digital platforms can address biased ratings that perpetuate discrimination, revealing a trade-off between user satisfaction and fairness, and proposing interventions to reduce unfairness effectively.
Contribution
It introduces an evolutionary game theoretical model to analyze rating-based discrimination and suggests proactive design strategies to promote fairness without significantly harming user experience.
Findings
Promoting highly-rated providers benefits users but can increase discrimination against marginalized groups.
Tuning search result demographics effectively reduces unfairness with minimal impact on user satisfaction.
Interventions are possible even without precise bias measurements, improving fairness in reputation systems.
Abstract
The digital services economy consists of online platforms that facilitate interactions between service providers and consumers. This ecosystem is characterized by short-term, often one-off, transactions between parties that have no prior familiarity. To establish trust among users, platforms employ rating systems which allow users to report on the quality of their previous interactions. However, while arguably crucial for these platforms to function, rating systems can perpetuate negative biases against marginalised groups. This paper investigates how to design platforms around biased reputation systems, reducing discrimination while maintaining incentives for all service providers to offer high quality service for users. We introduce an evolutionary game theoretical model to study how digital platforms can perpetuate or counteract rating-based discrimination. We focus on the platforms'…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSharing Economy and Platforms · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing
