Dynamics of Learning under User Choice: Overspecialization and Peer-Model Probing
In many economically relevant contexts where machine learning is deployed, multiple platforms obtain data from the same pool of users, each of whom selects the platform that best serves them. Prior work in this setting focuses exclusively on the "local" losses of learners on the distribution of data that they observe. We find that there exist instances where learners who use existing algorithms almost surely converge to models with arbitrarily poor global performance, even when models with low […]