# An Empirical Study on Compliance with Ranking Transparency in the Software Documentation of EU Online Platforms

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14794 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14794/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [Can ChatGPT Assess Human Personalities? A General Evaluation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01248/) (2023)
- [An Objective Metric for Explainable AI: How and Why to Estimate the Degree of Explainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05327/) (2021)
- [Distilling ChatGPT for Explainable Automated Student Answer Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12962/) (2023)
- [Regulating Gatekeeper AI and Data: Transparency, Access, and Fairness under the DMA, the GDPR, and beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04997/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Reflections on the Reproducibility of Commercial LLM Performance in Empirical Software Engineering Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25506/) (2025)
- [Security and Privacy in Agentic AI: Grand Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06608/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Compliance with the European Union's Platform-to-Business (P2B) Regulation is challenging for online platforms, and assessing their compliance can be difficult for public authorities. This is partly due to the lack of automated tools for assessing the information (e.g., software documentation) platforms provide concerning ranking transparency. Our study tackles this issue in two ways. First, we empirically evaluate the compliance of six major platforms (Amazon, Bing, Booking, Google, Tripadvisor, and Yahoo), revealing substantial differences in their documentation. Second, we introduce and test automated compliance assessment tools based on ChatGPT and information retrieval technology. These tools are evaluated against human judgments, showing promising results as reliable proxies for compliance assessments. Our findings could help enhance regulatory compliance and align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10.3, which seeks to reduce inequality, including business disparities, on these platforms.