Guaranteeing Accuracy and Fairness under Fluctuating User Traffic: A Bankruptcy-Inspired Re-ranking Approach

Abstract: Out of sustainable and economical considerations, two-sided recommendation platforms must satisfy the needs of both users and providers. Previous studies often show that the two sides' needs show different urgency: providers need a relatively long-term exposure demand while users want more short-term and accurate service. However, our empirical study reveals that previous methods for trading off fairness-accuracy often fail to guarantee long-term fairness and short-term accuracy simultaneously in real applications of fluctuating user traffic. Especially, when user traffic is low, the user experience often drops a lot. Our theoretical analysis also confirms that user traffic is a key factor in such a trade-off problem. How to guarantee accuracy and fairness under fluctuating user traffic remains a problem. Inspired by the bankruptcy problem in economics, we propose a novel fairness-aware re-ranking approach named BankFair. Intuitively, BankFair employs the Talmud rule to leverage periods of abundant user traffic to offset periods of user traffic scarcity, ensuring consistent user service at every period while upholding long-term fairness. Specifically, BankFair consists of two modules: (1) employing the Talmud rule to determine the required fairness degree under varying periods of user traffic; and (2) conducting an online re-ranking algorithm based on the fairness degree determined by the Talmud rule. Experiments on two real-world recommendation datasets show that BankFair outperforms all baselines regarding accuracy and provider fairness.