arXiv subjects

Bintong Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Bintong Chen.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Personalized Pricing in Social Networks with Individual and Group Fairness Considerations

Personalized pricing assigns different prices to customers for the same product based on customer-specific features to improve retailer revenue. However, this practice often raises concerns about fairness at both the individual and group levels. At the individual level, a customer may perceive unfair treatment if he/she notices being charged a higher price than others. At the group level, pricing disparities can result in discrimination against certain protected groups, such as those defined by gender or race. Existing studies on fair pricing typically address individual and group fairness separately. This paper bridges the gap by introducing a new formulation of the personalized pricing problem that incorporates both dimensions of fairness in social network settings. To solve the problem, we propose FairPricing, a novel framework based on graph neural networks (GNNs) that learns a personalized pricing policy using customer features and network topology. In FairPricing, individual perceived unfairness is captured through a penalty on customer demand, and thus the profit objective, while group-level discrimination is mitigated using adversarial debiasing and a price regularization term. Unlike existing optimization-based personalized pricing, which requires re-optimization whenever the network updates, the pricing policy learned by FairPricing assigns personalized prices to all customers in an updated network based on their features and the new network structure, thereby generalizing to network changes. Extensive experimental results show that FairPricing achieves high profitability while improving individual fairness perceptions and satisfying group fairness requirements.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

Proactive Resource Request for Disaster Response: A Deep Learning-based Optimization Model

Disaster response is critical to save lives and reduce damages in the aftermath of a disaster. Fundamental to disaster response operations is the management of disaster relief resources. To this end, a local agency (e.g., a local emergency resource distribution center) collects demands from local communities affected by a disaster, dispatches available resources to meet the demands, and requests more resources from a central emergency management agency (e.g., Federal Emergency Management Agency in the U.S.). Prior resource management research for disaster response overlooks the problem of deciding optimal quantities of resources requested by a local agency. In response to this research gap, we define a new resource management problem that proactively decides optimal quantities of requested resources by considering both currently unfulfilled demands and future demands. To solve the problem, we take salient characteristics of the problem into consideration and develop a novel deep learning method for future demand prediction. We then formulate the problem as a stochastic optimization model, analyze key properties of the model, and propose an effective solution method to the problem based on the analyzed properties. We demonstrate the superior performance of our method over prevalent existing methods using both real world and simulated data. We also show its superiority over prevalent existing methods in a multi-stakeholder and multi-objective setting through simulations.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Diversity Preference-Aware Link Recommendation for Online Social Networks

Link recommendation, which recommends links to connect unlinked online social network users, is a fundamental social network analytics problem with ample business implications. Existing link recommendation methods tend to recommend similar friends to a user but overlook the user's diversity preference, although social psychology theories suggest the criticality of diversity preference to link recommendation performance. In recommender systems, a field related to link recommendation, a number of diversification methods have been proposed to improve the diversity of recommended items. Nevertheless, diversity preference is distinct from diversity studied by diversification methods. To address these research gaps, we define and operationalize the concept of diversity preference for link recommendation and propose a new link recommendation problem: the diversity preference-aware link recommendation problem. We then analyze key properties of the new link recommendation problem and develop a novel link recommendation method to solve the problem. Using two large-scale online social network data sets, we conduct extensive empirical evaluations to demonstrate the superior performance of our method over representative diversification methods adapted for link recommendation as well as state-of-the-art link recommendation methods.

cs.LG↗