讲座时间：2026年1月8日10:30-11:30
讲座嘉宾：Mengjie CHENG, Harvard Business School
讲座主持：王丽丽，浙江大学管理学院
讲座地点：浙江大学管理学院会议室A523
讲座标题：Balancing Engagement and Polarization: Multi-Objective Alignment of News Content Using LLMs
讲座摘要：
We study how media firms can use LLMs to generate news content that aligns with multiple objectives—making content more engaging while maintaining a preferred level of polarization/slant consistent with the firm’s editorial policy. Using news articles from The New York Times, we first show that more engaging human-written content tends to be more polarizing. Further, naively employing LLMs (with prompts or standard Direct Preference Optimization approaches) to generate more engaging content can also increase polarization. This has an important managerial and policy implication: using LLMs without building in controls for limiting slant can exacerbate news media polarization. We present a constructive solution to this problem based on the Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization (MODPO) algorithm, a novel approach that integrates Direct Preference Optimization with multi-objective optimization techniques. We build on open-source LLMs and develop a new language model that simultaneously makes content more engaging while maintaining a preferred editorial stance. Our model achieves this by modifying content characteristics strongly associated with polarization, but that have a relatively smaller impact on engagement. Our approach and findings apply to other settings where firms seek to use LLMs for content creation to achieve multiple objectives, e.g., advertising and social media.
嘉宾简介：
Mengjie (Magie) Cheng is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Marketing at Harvard Business School. Her research focuses on content marketing, digital marketing, and generative AI. She brings together economic principles and behavioral insights with large language models, machine learning, and causal inference to inform strategic marketing decisions in the digital era. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked as a machine learning engineer on the Ads Ranking and Knowledge Graph teams at Facebook. She earned her B.S. in Finance from the Chu Kochen Honors College at Zhejiang University and her M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.
