An Economic Model of User Rating in an Online Recommender System

Economic modeling provides a formal mechanism to understand user incentives and behavior in online systems. In this paper we describe the process of building a parameterized economic model of user-contributed ratings in an online movie recommender system. We constructed a theoretical model to formalize our initial understanding of the system, and collected survey and behavioral data to calibrate an empirical model. This model explains 34% of the variation in user rating behavior. We found that while economic modeling in this domain requires an initial understanding of user behavior and access to an uncommonly broad set of user survey and behavioral data, it returns significant formal understanding of the activity being modeled.

[1]  E. Friedman,et al.  The Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms , 2001 .

[2]  Eric Horvitz,et al.  Learning and reasoning about interruption , 2003, ICMI '03.

[3]  Jeffrey M. Wooldridge,et al.  Introductory Econometrics: A Modern Approach , 1999 .

[4]  Orley Ashenfelter,et al.  Estimates of the Economic Return to Schooling from a New Sample of Twins , 1992 .

[5]  Steven D. Levitt.  Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Policeon Crime , 1995 .

[6]  Ilya Segal,et al.  Solutions manual for Microeconomic theory : Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green , 1997 .

[7]  Peter Brusilovsky,et al.  Adaptive Hypermedia , 2001, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction.

[8]  Steven D. Levitt,et al.  Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime: Comment , 2002 .

[9]  Hal R. Varian,et al.  How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time , 1997 .

[10]  A. Mas-Colell,et al.  Microeconomic Theory , 1995 .

[11]  John Riedl,et al.  An Empirical Analysis of Design Choices in Neighborhood-Based Collaborative Filtering Algorithms , 2002, Information Retrieval.

[12]  Jonathan Grudin,et al.  Why CSCW applications fail: problems in the design and evaluationof organizational interfaces , 1988, CSCW '88.

[13]  Claudia Keser,et al.  Experimental games for the design of reputation management systems , 2003, IBM Syst. J..

[14]  J. Bakos.  Reducing buyer search costs: implications for electronic marketplaces , 1997 .

[15]  Brian S. Butler,et al.  Membership Size, Communication Activity, and Sustainability: A Resource-Based Model of Online Social Structures , 2001, Inf. Syst. Res..

[16]  Peter Brusilovsky,et al.  Methods and techniques of adaptive hypermedia , 1996, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction.

[17]  Sean M. McNee,et al.  Interfaces for Eliciting New User Preferences in Recommender Systems , 2003, User Modeling.