CAREER: Auditing Online Choice Architecture for Antitrust Effects

该项目将在最近有效的独立算法审计的启发下，开发一门关于在线选择架构(OCA)审计的科学，并进行OCA审计，为反垄断法和公共政策提供信息。世界各地的立法者和监管机构都在审查“自我偏好”，即一家企业利用在一个市场中的主导地位，使其产品和服务在邻近市场获得优势，通常是通过以偏离用户偏好的方式推动用户选择。OCA审计将使用随机对照试验，在真实世界的环境中改变用户界面元素，通过因果推理和外部有效性确定一系列影响。对用户界面进行OCA审计将为反垄断政策制定者提供急需的经验证据，该项目还将开发收集更多证据的工具和方法。该研究将通过实现三个主要研究目标来沟通和促进人机交互和反垄断文献：(1)开发用于审计在线选择体系结构的新工具和方法，改进现有用于构建基于浏览器的研究的工具包以实现对网络用户界面的审计，以及创建用于实施操作系统用户界面审计的新工具包。(2)评估将参与者小组招募到亚奥理事会审计中的方法，考虑道德、代表性、有效性和成本。(3)进行OCA审计，以定量评估自我偏好的用户界面在搜索、电子商务和浏览器市场中的影响。搜索引擎审计将研究选项选票、默认设置、确认对话框和搜索结果。电子商务审计将检查搜索结果、推荐产品、自有品牌产品和购物箱。浏览器审计将研究选择选票和默认设置。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project will develop a science of online choice architecture (OCA) audits, inspired by recent and impactful independent algorithm audits, and conduct OCA audits to inform antitrust law and public policy. Legislators and regulators worldwide are scrutinizing "self-preferencing," where a business uses dominance in a market to give its products and services an advantage in an adjacent market, often by nudging user choices in ways that can diverge from user preferences. OCA audits will use randomized controlled trials that vary user interface elements in real-world settings, pinpointing a range of effects with causal inference and external validity. Carrying out OCA audits of user interfaces will provide much-needed empirical evidence for antitrust policymakers, and the project will also develop tools and methods for collecting additional evidence.The research will bridge and contribute to the human-computer interaction and antitrust literatures by achieving three main research goals: (1) Develop new tools and methods for auditing online choice architecture, improving an existing toolkit for building browser-based studies to enable audits of web user interfaces and creating a new toolkit for implementing audits of operating system user interfaces. (2) Evaluate methods for recruiting participant panels into OCA audits, accounting for ethics, representativeness, efficacy, and cost. (3) Conduct OCA audits to quantitatively estimate the effects of self-preferencing user interfaces in the search, e-commerce, and browser markets. The search engine audits will study choice ballots, default settings, confirmation dialogs, and search results. The e-commerce audits will examine search results, recommended products, private-label products, and buy boxes. The browser audits will study choice ballots and default settings.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.