Predicting Consumer Information Search Benefits for Personalized Online Product Ranking: a confidence-Based Approach

Product ranking mechanism is an important service for e-commerce that facilitates consumers’ decision-making process. This paper studies online product ranking under uncertainty. Different from previous studies that generally rank products merely based on predicted ratings, a new personalized product ranking method is proposed based on estimating consumer information search benefits and taking prediction uncertainty and confidence into consideration. Experiments using real data of movie ratings illustrate that the proposed method is advantageous over traditional point estimation methods, thus may help enhance customers’ satisfaction with the decision-making process and choices through saving their time and efforts.

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