Social Foundations of Computation

An Engine Not a Camera: Measuring Performative Power of Online Search

2024

Conference Paper

sf


The power of digital platforms is at the center of major ongoing policy and regulatory efforts. To advance existing debates, we designed and executed an experiment to measure the power of online search providers, building on the recent definition of performative power. Instantiated in our setting, performative power quantifies the ability of a search engine to steer web traffic by rearranging results. To operationalize this definition we developed a browser extension that performs unassuming randomized experiments in the background. These randomized experiments emulate updates to the search algorithm and identify the causal effect of different content arrangements on clicks. We formally relate these causal effects to performative power. Analyzing tens of thousands of clicks, we discuss what our robust quantitative findings say about the power of online search engines. More broadly, we envision our work to serve as a blueprint for how performative power and online experiments can be integrated with future investigations into the economic power of digital platforms.

Author(s): Mendler-Dünner, Celestine and Carovano, Gabriele and Hardt, Moritz
Book Title: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37 (NeurIPS 2024)
Year: 2024
Month: May

Department(s): Social Foundations of Computation
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (conference)

State: Accepted

Links: ArXiv

BibTex

@conference{mendler2024engine,
  title = {An Engine Not a Camera: Measuring Performative Power of Online Search},
  author = {Mendler-D{\"u}nner, Celestine and Carovano, Gabriele and Hardt, Moritz},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37 (NeurIPS 2024)},
  month = may,
  year = {2024},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {5}
}

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