Towards Ethical Item Ranking: A Paradigm Shift from User-Centric to Item-Centric Approaches

Ranking systems are instrumental in shaping user experiences by determining the relevance and order of presented items. However, current approaches, particularly those revolving around user-centric reputation scoring, raise ethical concerns associated with scoring individuals. To counter such issues, in this paper, we introduce a novel item ranking system approach that strategically transitions its emphasis from scoring users to calculating item rankings relying exclusively on items' ratings information, to achieve the same objective. Experiments on three datasets show that our approach achieves higher effectiveness and efficiency than state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, the resulting rankings are more robust to spam and resistant to bribery, contributing to a novel and ethically sound direction for item ranking systems.