Detecting Sponsored Recommendations
With a vast number of items, web-pages, and news to choose from, online services and the customers both benefit tremendously from personalized recommender systems. Such sys- tems however provide great opportunities for targeted adver- tisements, by displaying ads alongside genuine recommendations. We consider a biased recommendation system where such ads are displayed without any tags (disguised as genuine recommendations), rendering them indistinguishable to a single user. We ask whether it is possible for a small subset of collaborating users to detect such a bias.
