When making online purchases, consumers often encounter a lengthy list of products whose quality they know little or nothing about, ranked by an unknown algorithm. Users often turn to others’ online reviews to estimate product quality—a process known as social learning. HKUST’s Dongwook Shin and colleagues shed light on the challenges that platforms face ... Read More

Online product review platforms have become popular places for consumers to share their opinions on and experiences of the products and services they buy. In online marketplaces, the quality of a new product or service is initially unknown, but reviews posted by buyers inform subsequent customers. By reducing uncertainty about product quality, this type of ... Read More

Existing studies into ordinal optimization fall into one of two categories: fixed budget or fixed confidence. With fixed budget, the aim is to minimize the probability of false selection given a sampling budget. In a fixed confidence setting, the target is to come up with a sampling procedure that satisfies a desired guarantee on the probability of false ... Read More