Preference Dynamics Under Personalized Recommendations

The design of content recommendation systems underpins many online platforms: social media feeds, online news aggregators, and audio/video hosting websites all choose how best to organize an enormous amount of content for users to consume. Many projects (both practical and academic) have designed algorithms to match users to content they will enjoy under the assumption that user's preferences and opinions do not change with the content they see. However, increasing amounts of evidence suggest that individuals' preferences are directly shaped by what content they see---radicalization, rabbit holes, polarization, and boredom are all example phenomena of preferences affected by content. Polarization in particular can occur even in ecosystems with "mass media," where no personalization takes place, as recently explored in a natural model of preference dynamics by [14] and [13]. If all users' preferences are drawn towards content they already like, or are repelled from content they already dislike, uniform consumption of media leads to a population of heterogeneous preferences converging towards only two poles. In this work, we explore whether some phenomenon akin to polarization occurs when users receive personalized content recommendations. We use a similar model of preference dynamics, where an individual's preferences move towards content the consume and enjoy, and away from content they consume and dislike. We show that standard user reward maximization is an almost trivial goal in such an environment (a large class of simple algorithms will achieve only constant regret). A more interesting objective, then, is to understand under what conditions a recommendation algorithm can ensure stationarity of user's preferences. We show how to design a content recommendations which can achieve approximate stationarity, under mild conditions on the set of available content, when a user's preferences are known, and how one can learn enough about a user's preferences to implement such a strategy even when user preferences are initially unknown.