Document
Fairness in Information Retrieval from an Economic Perspective
Tutorial @ SIGIR 2025
[SIGIR'25 Proposal TBD]    [Tookits]

Summary

Recently, fairness-aware information retrieval (IR) systems have been receiving much attention. Numerous fairness metrics and algorithms have been proposed. The complexity of fairness and IR systems makes it challenging to provide a systematic summary of the progress that has been made. This complexity calls for a more structured framework to navigate future fairness-aware IR research directions. The field of economics has long explored fairness, offering a strong theoretical and empirical foundation. Its system-oriented perspective enables the integration of IR fairness into a broader framework that considers societal and intertemporal trade-offs. In this tutorial, we first highlight that IR systems can be understood as a specialized economic market. Then, we re-organize fairness algorithms through three key economic dimensions—macro vs.\ micro, demand vs.\ supply, and short-term vs.\ long-term. We effectively view most fairness categories in IR from an economic perspective. Finally, we illustrate how this economic framework can be applied to various real-world IR applications and we demonstrate its benefits in industrial scenarios. Different from oth fairness-aware tutorials, our tutorial not only provides a new and clear perspective to re-frame fairness-aware IR but also inspires the use of economic tools to solve fairness problems in IR. We hope this tutorial provides a fresh, broad perspective on fairness in IR, highlighting open problems and future research directions.

Schedule

Tutorial Organizers

 

Chen Xu

Ph.D Student

Renmin University of China

 

Clara Rus

Ph.D Student

University of Amsterdam

 

Yuanna Liu

Ph.D Student

University of Amsterdam

 
 

Marleen de Jonge

Ph.D Student

University of Amsterdam

 

Jun Xu

Professor

Renmin University of China

 

Maarten de Rijke

Distinguished Professor

University of Amsterdam