论文标题
平衡消费者和推荐系统的业务价值:基于模拟的分析
Balancing Consumer and Business Value of Recommender Systems: A Simulation-based Analysis
论文作者
论文摘要
如今,可以在许多电子商务平台上找到自动建议,这些建议可以为消费者和提供商创造大量价值。但是,通常并非所有推荐的物品都具有相同的利润率,因此,提供商可能会诱使促进最大化其利润的项目。在短期内,消费者可能会接受非最佳建议,但从长远来看,他们可能会失去信任。最终,这导致了设计平衡的推荐策略的问题,这些策略既考虑消费者和提供商的价值,并带来持续的业务成功。这项工作提出了一个基于基于代理的建模的仿真框架,旨在帮助提供者探索不同推荐策略的纵向动态。在我们的模型中,消费者会从提供者那里收到建议,而建议的质量会影响消费者的信任。我们设计了几种推荐策略,可以使提供商的利润更大,或者对消费者公用事业。我们的模拟表明,一种混合策略会增加消费者公用事业的权重,但没有忽略盈利能力,从长远来看会带来最高的累计利润。与纯粹的消费者或面向利润的策略相比,这种混合策略的利润增加了约20%。我们还发现,社交媒体可以加强观察到的现象。如果消费者在很大程度上依赖社交媒体时,最佳战略的累积利润进一步增加。为了确保可重复性并培养未来的研究,我们将公开共享灵活的模拟框架。
Automated recommendations can nowadays be found on many e-commerce platforms, and such recommendations can create substantial value for consumers and providers. Often, however, not all recommendable items have the same profit margin, and providers might thus be tempted to promote items that maximize their profit. In the short run, consumers might accept non-optimal recommendations, but they may lose their trust in the long run. Ultimately, this leads to the problem of designing balanced recommendation strategies, which consider both consumer and provider value and lead to sustained business success. This work proposes a simulation framework based on agent-based modeling designed to help providers explore longitudinal dynamics of different recommendation strategies. In our model, consumer agents receive recommendations from providers, and the perceived quality of the recommendations influences the consumers' trust over time. We design several recommendation strategies which either give more weight on provider profit or on consumer utility. Our simulations show that a hybrid strategy that puts more weight on consumer utility but without ignoring profitability considerations leads to the highest cumulative profit in the long run. This hybrid strategy results in a profit increase of about 20 % compared to pure consumer or profit oriented strategies. We also find that social media can reinforce the observed phenomena. In case when consumers heavily rely on social media, the cumulative profit of the best strategy further increases. To ensure reproducibility and foster future research, we publicly share our flexible simulation framework.