User-item fairness tradeoffs in recommendations

Neural Information Processing Systems 

In the basic recommendation paradigm, the most (predicted) relevant item is recommended to each user. This may result in some items receiving lower exposure than they "should"; to counter this, several algorithmic approaches have been developed to ensure item fairness. These approaches necessarily degrade recommendations for some users to improve outcomes for items, leading to user fairness concerns. In turn, a recent line of work has focused on developing algorithms for multi-sided fairness, to jointly optimize user fairness, item fairness, and overall recommendation quality. This induces the question: what is the tradeoff between these objectives, and what are the characteristics of (multi-objective) optimal solutions?