The Feedback Loop Between Recommendation Systems and Reactive Users

Recommendation systems underlie a variety of online platforms. These recommendation systems and their users form a feedback loop, wherein the former aims to maximize user engagement through personalization and the promotion of popular content, while the recommendations shape users’ opinions or behaviors, potentially influencing future recommendations. These dynamics have been shown to lead to shifts in users’ opinions. In this paper, we ask whether reactive users, who are cognizant of the influence of the content they consume, can prevent such changes by actively choosing whether to engage with recommended content. We first model the feedback loop between reactive users’ opinion dynamics and a recommendation system. We study these dynamics under three different policies - fixed content consumption (a passive policy), and decreasing or adaptive decreasing content consumption (reactive policies). We analytically show how reactive policies can help users effectively prevent or restrict undesirable opinion shifts, while still deriving utility from consuming content on the platform. We validate and illustrate our theoretical findings through numerical experiments.