Abhisek Dash: When the Umpire is Also a Player: Understanding Biases in E-commerce Marketplaces

Abstract: E-commerce marketplaces like Amazon deploy a number of algorithmic systems to mediate the interaction between their business users and end users. Recently, Amazon's business policies and deployed algorithmic systems have come under intense legal scrutiny across the globe. In this talk, I shall present a brief overview of our observations while auditing a number of algorithmic systems deployed on Amazon. I will touch upon how, through algorithmic systems, Amazon can potentially (a) steer customers toward sellers who use its subsidiary services through its default offer selection algorithm, (b) present customers to products different than what they would have preferred through search in different modalities and (c) make its private label products more accessible through its sponsored product recommendation. Finally, I shall try to put these observations in perspective of the recent regulations discussed in the Digital Markets Act in the European Union.

Speaker Bio: Abhisek Dash is a postdoctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) in the Networked Systems Research Group. He has received his PhD from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. His research interests lie in investigating unfairness, bias related concerns in online socio-technical systems. His research has been published in highly competitive venues like ACM Web Conference, ACM CSCW, AAAI ICWSM, ACM FAccT, IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE TCSS etc.

Homepage: https://people.mpi-sws.org/~adash